When I was a kid, my sister and step-sister and I used to sit in the back of my step-mom's van and sing along to the radio. When Madonna's "Spanish Love" (or Spanish Eyes?) came on, we'd all sing the first verse together: "Last night, I dreamt of some pickle..."
Years later, I figured out she was saying "San Pedro," not "some pickle." But by then, it was too late. The song would forever be about marinated cucumbers for me.
Turns out there's a word for this kind of mix-up: it's called a mondegreen. And what's even better than this geeky tidbit of word-flavored information is the way I discovered it.
See, I'm preparing for Santa Con here in Santa Barbara, which a friend is starting this Friday at Elsie's. And I was cruising Tribe for naughty Christmas Carols when I came across these:
FROSTY THE PHOTON
=================
Frosty the Photon
He is such a quantum sight;
You can see him pass with a zero mass
and a speed as fast as light.
Frosty the Photon
Has a wavelength we all know
With an energy given by h f
And he's born when candles glow.
There wasn't any magic
In the physics lab that night
But when they split those atoms wide
Ol' Frosty came to light.
Frosty the Photon.
Knows he'll be absorbed, he fears.
But his energy and momentum too
Will live on for endless years.
(For more, click here: Download physics_carols.doc)
Naturally, I had to email them to my physics professors from college (who I befriended while still convinced I was going to be a physics major. And yes, I was a physics major for two years before swiching to writing. go figure). And so one of them, the fantastic physicist/poet Robert Reynolds, emailed his own little tidbit:
I was blown away a few years back to hear a description of the origin of the hard-to-understand "partridge in a pear tree". What (I always asked, as I assume everyone does) is the partridge doing in a pear tree?
But I found out. It's not...The song comes from the part of England nearest France and simply names the partridge twice, once in each language, thus: "and a partridge une perdrix."
Further, the "five gold rings" refers to ring-necked pheasants, and the true line is "four collie birds" meaning coal black.Cool, no?
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