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‘How do you like shy ... In de mboni shambalala...” Then the drummer comes in: do do dum...
That’s how I sang Shambala by the rock band Three Dog Night. “Ei, yea, yea, yea... Ei in de mboni Shambalala…” the song continued.
The real lyrics are: “How does your light shine … on the road to Shambala.”
Then came the young Michael Jackson, who sang in fluent Sesotho, ke bao ka di botsotso. Chelet’ e fedile. “There they are in their tight jeans. All the money is finished.”
The real lyrics are: “Keep on with the force. Don’t stop, don’t stop ’til you get enough…”
This is called a mondegreen – the mishearing of lyrics where the listener substitutes words that sound similar.
The term was coined by American writer Sylvia Wright in an essay entitled The Death of Lady Mondegreen, which was published in Harper’s Magazine in 1954. When she was a child, Wright’s mother used to read to her from Percy’s Reliques and this is what little Sylvia heard:
“Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.”
The words of this first verse of the poem The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray are slightly different:
“Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands,
Oh where have you been?
They have slain the Earl o’ Moray
And layd him on the green.”
Why would anyone correct a child and deny her the bliss of ignorance? After all, the shortcoming of adulthood is knowing too much. To adults, the demarcations between right and wrong are clear and wide, and the dos and don’ts are colour-coded so they can’t be confused. In the eyes of a child, however, everything is an opportunity to learn, even though some lessons may be painful – for in life, we are created in pleasure but born in pain.
Mondegreens remind us that it is not what you say that matters, or even how you say it, but what is heard. To paraphrase the author Anaïs Nin, we don’t hear things as they are, but as we are.
If a black man says to a younger one:“Come here, my boy,” it is not a problem. But the same statement uttered by a white man of the same age could trigger a racial war. This is because a conversation is a combination of vocabulary, history and ego.
Always choose the simpler word. Never speak of an otorhinolaryngologist, rather an ear, nose and throat specialist. Imagine the mondegreen of that?
Emails are the cause of many a misunderstanding. It depends on the mood of the reader, who can add all sorts of imagined interpretations.
These days, phone calls are hard to take and SMSes have become a convenient alternative. DCpln yoslf & dnt rt in txt spik, because then you’ll be on the mboni to nutting.
Kuzwayo is the founder of Ignitive, an advertising agency.
