My daughter Caitriona wrote to me lately about the term “shoo in” or as it is more often, and incorrectly, written “shoe in”. This is an example of an “eggcorn” or a word incorrectly written which appears to make more sense than the original.
Those of you who, like me, like that sort of thing can now have hours of harmless fun googling in eggcorn to find other examples.
I did, and this in turn led me to a wonderful and newly coined word ; “mondagreen”
This is what I found when looked it up:
“The American writer Sylvia Wright coined it in an essay “The Death of Lady Mondegreen”, which was published in Harper’s Magazine in November 1954.
She wrote:“When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy’s Reliques. One of my favorite poems began, as I remember:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl of Murray, and Lady Mondegreen.
The actual last line should be “And laid him on the green”,

This is absolutely perfect for a person, like me, obsessed with words, a beautiful coinage indeed.
I distinctly remember from the prayers during the Rosary at home that I was always convinced that there was a part of Hail Mary which went:
“ Blessed art thou, a monk swimming” this was way, way more interesting a picture to while away the Rosary hours than “Blessed art thou amongst women”.
One Mondagreen I particularly remember being shocked with was when a great friend of mine came back from her first term of studying to be a nurse to the intellectually disabled.
I heard the song she was singing and assumed that it was the result of a new confrontational approach to nursing the mentally challenged.
She was singing “Remember you’re a Womble”
Unfortunately I misheard it as “Remember you’re a Mongol”

Pop songs are a particularly rich source of mondegreens, I remember with fondness in the the eighties as Huey Lewis sang “Go and get stuffed!” a much better line than “Goin gets tough”
One could even invent deliberate mondagreens.
I always wanted Glen Cambell to be “Singing in Dwyers” rather than “Singing in the wires” and always wanted to support the Wolf Tones when they said;
“Every man must stand behind the men behind Dwyer”

Now just last weekend one of my daughters said that they found my blog easier to read when there was a picture.
So here is, to coin a phrase, a Mondagreen Picture of the dead Lady Mondagreen.(With profound apologies to Millais-and Shakespeare)
(We must assume that the Earl of Murray has already been buried)