monkey wrench / throw a monkey wrench into

A page from a machinist’s textbook showing a monkey wrench (left) compared to a Stillson or pipe wrench (right). Both are adjustable wrenches, but the monkey wrench is designed to grip straight surfaces, like hex bolts. The pipe wrench permits some play in the jaws, allowing it to grip circular surfaces, like pipes.

18 May 2021

[19 May 2021: added reference and link to Peter Reitan’s blog; 20 May 2021: added minor clarifications and corrections to the likely/unlikely origins]

A monkey wrench is a type of adjustable wrench or spanner. And to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery is a metaphor for disrupting something, a metaphor of throwing a heavy metal object into machinery. The term originated in Britain, although nowadays it’s primarily found in North American speech and writing.

Why it is called a monkey wrench is uncertain, and there are a number of possibilities, as well as a series of false etymologies based on the name of its supposed inventor. Among the likely origins are that the wrench could be so called because it is a metal object that moves up and down a vertical shaft, not unlike a monkey climbing up and down a tree. Others have observed that the head of the wrench resembles a monkey’s head. (I don’t really see it, but okay. It’s a valid opinion.)

What we do know for sure about the origins is that the term is recorded in England in the early nineteenth century. There is a record of a Richard Fleetwood of Parr and Rainford manufacturing monkey wrenches. He was in business by 1807, although if he was making monkey wrenches as early as that year we don’t know. We do, however, have a definitive use of monkey wrench in the Chester Chronicle of 4 August 1826 in a list of seventeen defendants on trial for various crimes:

13. Andrew Sealion, (27) stabbing David Rogers.
14. William Poole, (50) stealing a candlestick, the property of Daniel Poole.
15. William Darlington, (60) stealing a monkey wrench, the property of the Canal Company.
16. John Phelan, (17) stealing £70. 7s. 10d. the monies of John Finchett-Maddock.

Monkey wrench appears in North America by 1838. The following advertisement appears in the Natchez Daily Courier (Mississippi) on 20 September 1838:

HARDWARE.
CARPENTERS knob-locks, flush bolts, cast butts, monkey wrenches, hand-cuffs, Salters Patent Spring balances; with a large and general assortment of Carpenters tools for sale by
sept 20                         PATTERSON & WISWALL

The following odd legal notice appears in the New York Evening Post on 31 May 1839, announcing a lawsuit having been filed against an assortment of property that includes a monkey wrench. Under U.S. law it is possible to sue property, especially when the ownership of the property is to be decided by the court. In the notice, the word libel is being used to mean a written complaint, not an accusation of defamation:

Whereas a libel hath been filed in the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York, on the 24th day of May, A.D. 1839, by Gabriel Dissossway, Libellant, on behalf of himself and others, the crew of the schooner Elisha Ruckman, against 5 Spanish hides, 1 barrel of brown sugar, 2 harness casks, 7 sails[?], 14 yards of canvass, ship’s side steps, side skids, 18 fathom square sail halyard, 10 pounds of rope yarn, 8 pounds spun yarn, 1 keg, 1 tea cannister, 1 oil can, 2 jugs of oil, 12 purchase blocks, 2 barrels, 1 monkey wrench, 2 ship’s scrapers, shovel, a part of the cargo of the schooner La Bruce[?].

And whereas the substance of the said libel is, that the Libellant, with others of the crew of the said schooner Elisha Ruckman, on or about the 21st of April 1839, on the high seas fell on[?] with the schooner La Bruce[?], totally abandoned and derelict, that they then boarded her and towed her into port, with the articles before enumerated, and praying that said articles may be condemned and sold to pay the Libellants a reasonable salvage for the same.

And we get a formal definition in an 1858 Dictionary of Trade Products:

MONKEY-WRENCH, a spanner with a moveable jaw.

One explanation for the term that appears as a suggestion in some major dictionaries is that monkey has been used to refer to menial laborers since the seventeenth century, so the wrench could be one used by such laborers. This, however, is somewhat doubtful, as these instances are few, and invariably refer to jobs commonly performed by children (e.g., powder monkey), who can be likened to monkeys.

It is often claimed that the monkey wrench is named after its inventor, either a Charles Moncke or any number of others with a similar name. There is no evidence supporting any of these claims, and in all the claims that I have seen, the inventor is said to be an American and to have invented it on a date after we find the term in print. Given the wide variety of claims, the fact that the proffered names are invariably American when monkey wrench first appears in Britain, and the claimed invention sometimes coming decades after the actual invention, we can confidently dismiss these claims as false.

Another false etymology is that monkey wrench is a racial slur because it was invented by former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, a Black man. Johnson did patent a type of wrench in 1922, but as we’ve seen, this was about a century after the wrench’s invention. There is no evidence linking monkey wrench to the racial slur monkey.

As for throwing a monkey wrench into the machinery, that idiom is an Americanism that appears in the late nineteenth century. The earliest use I have found is ambiguous, in that it is not clear whether the use is metaphorical or if an actual monkey wrench were dropped into a printing press. The context is the Boston mayoral election of 1884. From the Marion Daily Star of 9 October 1889:

M. J. Kiley, the Boston Democrat who was to print ballots for both sides in the election when O’Brien was first made mayor, but who dropped a monkey wrench into the press before the Republican ballots were run off may be there.

It appears again in the San Francisco Chronicle of 6 July 1892. Again, the context is that of politics, but here the use is clearly metaphorical, the machinery being that of the legislative process:

Bland’s action in insisting upon amending the Stewart bill has been severely criticised. He is charged with occupying the position of the man who threw a monkey-wrench into a threshing machine because he was not allowed to feed it. The trouble with Bland seems to be that it is Stewart’s bill and not his. He wants all the fame, even if he jeopardizes the cause in which he proposes to lead.

The British version, throw a spanner into, appears later, although that co-location of words referring to a literal throwing of a wrench appears a bit earlier. In a London Times article from 27 April 1879 about an explosion at Woolrich Arsenal:

An inquest was held at Woolrich on Tuesday relative to the death of Johnson, a lad employed in the cartridge factory of the Royal Arsenal, who died on Monday from injuries received through an explosion on Saturday. The lad had stated after the accident that it was caused by his throwing a spanner into a box in the workshop, and that something in the box immediately exploded; but the evidence pointed to a different conclusion.

The metaphorical use of the British version is recorded in a 1925 story by Owen Collinson:

Hugh sat and gazed with outraged eyes at this wrecker of his life. A vision of Joyce came to him, and his heart sank as he told himself for the thousandth time that she was lost to him for ever. And Wilfred had done it—this pale little man who lad meddled with forces unimaginably beyond his comprehension, like some small boy light-heartedly throwing a spanner into a mighty dynamo and causing immense disruption.

Peter Jensen Brown’s (a.k.a. Peter Reitan) Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog has more on monkey wrenches, including some other plausible (but still unsupported with evidence) hypotheses as to why they are called that.

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Sources:

Advertisement. Natchez Daily Courier (Mississippi), 20 September 1838. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

“Chester Summer Sessions.” Chester Chronicle (England), 4 August 1826, 3. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Collinson, Owen. “The Perfect Friend.” Sunday Pictorial (London), 8 March 1925, 16. Gale Primary Sources: Mirror Historical Archive.

Dane, E. Surrey. Peter Stubs and the Lancashire Hand Tool Industry. Altrincham, UK: John Sherratt and Son, 1973, 219.

Evon, Dan. “Did Jack Johnson Invent the Monkey Wrench?” Snopes.com, 14 December 2015.

“Explosion at the Woolrich Arsenal.” Sunday Times (London), 27 April 1879, 5. Gale Primary Sources: Sunday Times Historical Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. monkey, v.

“Our New York Letter.” Marion Daily Star (Ohio), 9 October 1889, 3.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, s.v. monkey wrench, n.; March 2021, s.v. monkey, n., monkey, v.

“Silver Men United.” San Francisco Chronicle, 6 July 1892, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Simmonds, P. L. A Dictionary of Trade Products. London: G. Routledge, 1858, 251. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Staten, Vince. Did Monkeys Invent the Monkey Wrench. New York: Touchstone, 1996, 41–43.

Stimpson, George. A Book About a Thousand Things. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946, 287. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Tréguer, Pascal. “Origin of ‘Throw a Monkey Wrench Into’: Threshing Machines.” Wordhistories.net, 25 May 2018.

Waddell, Wm. Coventry H., U.S. Marshal. “Southern District of New York.” Evening Post (New York), 31 May 1839, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Rogers, William. The Progressive Machinist: A Practical and Educational Treatise, with Illustrations. New York: Theodore Audel, 1903, 172. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Public domain image.

morphology

20 May 2021

Sometimes the person who has coined a word is not someone you would suspect of doing so. Such is the case with morphology, the study of structure and forms and their relationship to one another. Morphology is used in both biology and linguistics. The coiner of the word, though, is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, author of the novel Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) and the play Faust. While Goethe is most famous for his literary output, he also produced a number of scientific works. He was quite the polymath.

The word Morphologie appears in Goethe’s biological notes in 1796, and it appears in an 1807 published note by him:

Man findet daher in dem Gange der Kunst, des Wissens und der Wissenschaft mehrere Versuche, eine Lehre zu gründen und auszubilden, welche wir die Morphologie nennen möchten.

(One finds, therefore, in the course of art, knowledge, and science several attempts to establish and develop a discipline that we shall call morphology.)

English, however, did not borrow the word directly from the German; French intervened. Morphology first appeared in English in 1828 in a translation of Hippolyte Cloquet’s Traité d’Anatomie Descriptive (Treatise on Descriptive Anatomy):

The numerous organs of which the human body consists, we shall consider principally with reference to the forms which they present, and the mutual relations which they possess; and this view of the subject is what constitutes Descriptive Anatomy, properly so called, which as itself capable of being divided into the Particular Anatomy of Organs, or Morphology, and the Anatomy of Regions or Topographical Anatomy, if we may use the expression; while that part of the science which treats of the structure and properties of the different tissues which are common to several organs, takes the name of General Anatomy or Histology. To the latter belongs the examination of the general characters of all the organs and humours.

Morphology is also used in linguistics, the study of word roots and affixes (i.e., morphemes) and their relationships, as opposed to a word’s phonetic properties. Again, this use of the word first appears in German, in August Schleicher’s 1859 Zur Morphologie der Sprache (On the Morphology of Language):

Den gegenstand der morphologie der sprache bildet die lautliche form des wortes, seine äußere gestalt, d. h. das vorhandensein oder felen seiner teile und die stellung, welche dise teile ein nemen; unberüksichtigt laßen wir das material, auß dem das wort gebildet ist, den klang der zum aufbau desselben verwanten lautelemente.

(The object of study of the morphology of the language is the phonetic form of the word, its external gestalt, i.e., the existence or absence of its parts and the position these parts take; we do not take into account the material out of which the word is constructed, the sound of the phonemes used to construct it.)

That same year, clergyman and philologist Frederic Farrar used morphology and morphological in a series of lectures given at the Royal Institution in March 1859. The lectures were published in 1870. Now, it’s a dirty little secret that the field of linguistics, or philology as it was once known, was established on foundations of nineteenth-century racism and nationalism, an attempt at using language to prove a theory of white supremacy. While the field has moved away from these roots, racist vestiges guiding teaching and research can still be found. Farrar’s lecture, however, presents these abhorrent ideas in raw, unvarnished form. In the following passage, he openly discounts the value of “non-Aryan-Semitic” cultures, and praises the white colonizers for their “heroic” work in studying and preserving those lesser languages:

But while at first the mind may almost seem to sink bewildered before the numberless multitudes of tribes like these—tribes which have contributed nothing to the progress or enlightenment of the human race—tribes which have succeeded others which seem if possible to have been even lower still, and which once covered such colossal spaces of the earth's surface in every stage of nomad unprogressiveness or squalid savagery—yet even here Philology has not resigned her task, and here also she has some of her highest lessons to teach, lessons which have been won in many a year of terrible hardship and perilous fatigue, by many an heroic missionary and intrepid pioneer. And so completely has the earth been traversed over its remotest regions, and pierced to its extremest solitudes, that it is probable that there is no mode of human speech of which, in some of its dialects, we do not now possess vocabularies and specimens. Now no absolute morphological* classification of the non-Aryo-Semitic languages is possible; no firm and definite lines of demarcation can be drawn between the outlying members and debateable lands of the separate linguistic kingdoms.

* By the morphology of a language we mean the general laws of its grammatical structure.

Sometimes word origins come from unexpected directions. It’s no surprise that Goethe coined a word, but the fact that it was morphology is.

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Sources:

Cloquet, Hippolyte. A System of Human Anatomy. Robert Knox, trans. Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1830, 2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Farrar, Frederic W. Families of Speech: Four Lectures Delivered Before the Royal Institution of Great Britain in March 1859. London: Longmans, Green, 1870, 159–60. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Schriften Zur Morphologie II. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche. 15. Google Books.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2019, s.v. morphology, n.

Schleicher, August. Zur Morphologie der Sprache. Mémoires de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg, series 7, vol. 1, no. 7. St. Petersburg: Eggers, 1859, 1.  HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Joseph Karl Stieler, 1828, oil on canvas. Neue Penakothek, Munich. Public domain image.

absentee

An 1880 political cartoon titled “What Things Are Coming to; or, the Boycotted and Land-Leagued Landowner.” A tenant, wearing a traditional Irish conical hat, smoking a pipe, and holding a cudgel behind his back, confronts a blind landlord in shabby and worn clothing begging for rent. The landlord bears a sign reading, “Pity the Poor Landlord,” and is drawn to resemble English prime minister William Gladstone.

19 May 2021

An absentee is someone who is not present when they are supposed to be. It is an example of semantic generalization, a word that at first refers to a specific thing but over time comes to refer to a wider category of things. In this case, absentee originally referred to English owners of land in Ireland who seldom or never visited their Irish estates, but eventually the word came to refer to anyone who wasn’t at a place when they were supposed to have been.

Absentee comes from the verb absent + -ee. The English verb to absent, meaning to withdraw or remove oneself, dates to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries. It is a borrowing of the Anglo-Norman verb absenter, to stay away from, a verb that is recorded in the late thirteenth century and which comes from the Latin absentare. The -ee suffix, originally used in legal terms but which has since expanded into other contexts, marks nouns used as indirect objects. It is from the Anglo-Norman -é.

Absentee first appears in English in the Act of Absenties (28.H8), passed by the Irish parliament in 1537 during the reign of Henry VIII. The intent of the act was to seize revenues from absentee landlords in Ireland, ostensibly for the benefit of the Irish people and the security of English rule in Ireland, because of the failures of the absentee landlords to maintain their estates. But it was passed contemporaneously with Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in England, part of a larger scheme to raise money for the crown. This passage quoted below is from the beginning of the act and contains part of one of the longest sentences I have ever seen, extending over two pages (the initial sentence of the act ends just before the word, “Be it enacted”):

The Act of Absenties.

For asmuch as it is notorious and manifest that this the Kings land of Ireland being inhabited and in due obedience and subiection unto the Kings most noble progenitors kings of England, who in those dayes in the right of the Crowne of England, had great possessions, rents, and profites within the same land, hath principally growen into ruine, dessolation. rebellion and decay, by occasion that great dominions, landes, and possessions within the same land, as well by the kings graunts as by course of inheritance, and otherwise desceded to Noblemen of the Realme of England, and especially the lands and dominions of the Earledomes in Ulster and Leinster, who hauing the same both they and their heyres by processe of time demoring within the said realme of England, and not prouiding for the good order and suertie of the same their possessions there, in their absence and by their negligences suffered those of the wilde Irishrie being mortall and naturall enemies of the kings of England, and English dominion, to enter and hold the same without resistance, [...] and that if his Grace would take of the inheritors and possessioners of the same, the arrerages of the two parts of the yearely profites thereof by reason of their absence out of the said land, contrary to ye statuts therof prouided, the same would counteruaile the purchase therof, yet for corroboration of the right and title of our said soueraigne Lord the King, and his heires, which he hath to all the same lands, dominions and possessions. Be it enacted, established, and ordeyned by the king our soueraigns Lord, Lords spirituall and temporall, and commons in this present Parliament assembled, and by authoritie of the same, that King, his heyres and assignes shall haue, hold, and enioy as in the right of the Crowne of England, all honors, mannors, castles, seigniories, hundreds, franchises, liberties, countie palantines, iurisdictions, anuities, knights fees, aduowsons, patronages, lands tenements, wood, meadowes [...]

Thomas Blount’s legal dictionary of 1670 defines absentee, notes its French origin, and references the 1537 act:

Absentees or des Absentees, was a Parliament so called, held at Dublin, 10 May, 28 H.8.

The 1537 act hardly ended, or even curtailed, the practice of absentee landlordism, and the abuses the Irish people suffered under neglect of their absent landlords and the money continually siphoned out of Ireland became one of leading causes of Irish rebellion over the centuries.

In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift wrote, under the pseudonym of M. B. Drapier, of the practice in one of series of pamphlets attacking the practices of English governance in Ireland. “An Humble Address to Both Houses of Parliament” (Drapier Letter 7) is primarily in opposition to a patent to mint coins granted to William Wood, but mentions the problem of absentee landlords shipping their profits over the Irish Sea to England. The pamphlet was written c.1725 but went initially unpublished because the patent had been withdrawn. It was finally published ten years later in a collection of Swift’s works:

The Rents of Land in Ireland, since they have been of late so enormously raised and screwed up, may be computed to about two Millions; whereof one third Part, at least, is directly transmitted to those, who are perpetual Absentees in England, as I find by a Computation made with the Assistance of several skillful Gentlemen.

Nor is absentee the only word to arise out of the practice of absentee landlordism in Ireland. The term boycott also arose out of the practice.

But also in the eighteenth century, the meaning of absentee expanded to include people other than English landlords who weren’t in Ireland. In his 1792 memoirs, Unitarian and dissenting writer Gilbert Wakefield wrote of the practice of beneficed clergy hiring others to do their work for them in the pulpit:

The common exhibitioners at St. Mary’s, were the hack preachers, employed in the service of defaulters and absentees. A piteous unedifying tribe!

And by the early nineteenth century, absentee was being used to denote students who played hooky. From Joseph Lancaster’s 1805 edition of his Improvements in Education:

The monitor calls his boys to muster—the class go out of the seats in due order—go round the school-room; and, in going, each boy stops, and ranges himself against the wall, under that number which belongs to his name in the class-list. By this means the absentees are pointed out at once—every boy who is absent will leave a number vacant.

The use of absentee in the context of voting started during the U.S. Civil War, allowing for soldiers stationed away from home to vote. The following is from a speech given by William Warner, a member of the Michigan state legislature, to that body on 28 January 1864:

The House bill No. 5 provides, that polls shall be opened for each regiment, or detached portion of each regiment or company of Michigan soldiers, when absent from the township or ward in which they reside, in the military service of this State or of the United States; that such polls shall be opened on the same day that is provided for by Title 83, Chap. 6, of the compiled laws; that Commissioners shall be appointed to take the votes of such absentees; that the votes shall be canvassed immediately after the polls shall be closed.

A rather long path from sixteenth-century Ireland to the U.S. Civil War.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. absenter.

Blount, Thomas. ΝΟΜΟ-ΛΕΞΙΚΟΝ: A Law Dictionary. London: Thomas Newcomb for John Martin and Henry Herringman, 1670. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lancaster, Joseph. Improvements in Education, third edition. London: Darton and Harvey, 1805, 112. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. absentee, n. and adj., absent, v.

The Statutes of Ireland, Beginning the Third Yere of K. Edward the Second, and Continuing Until the End of the Parliament, Begunne in the Eleventh Yeare of the Reign of Our Most Gracious Soveraigne Lord King James. Dublin: Society of Stationers, 1621, 95–100. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Swift, Jonathan (under the pseudonym of M. B. Drapier). “An Humble Address to Both Houses of Parliament” (Drapier Letter 7) (c.1725). Works, vol. 4. Dublin: George Faulkner, 1735, 223. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Wakefield, Gilbert. Memoirs of the Life of Gilbert Wakefield. London: E. Hodson, 1792, 97. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Warner, William. Soldier’s Suffrage. Detroit: 1864, 5. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Thomson, John Gordon. “What Things Are Coming to; or, the Boycotted and Land-Leagued Landowner.” Fun, 32.812, 1 December 1880, 217. ProQuest Historical Periodicals. Public domain image.

cicada

Seventeen-year cicada nymph of Brood X (dead); an orange insect with large, red eyes and small, immature wings

17 May 2021

Cicadas are insects of the order Hemiptera (i.e., true bugs) and the superfamily Cicadoidea. They are found throughout the world. But those of the North American genus Magicicada have the unusual property of living underground for periods of thirteen or seventeen years. This behavior is believed to have evolved as a survival strategy. When they emerge, they do so in such great numbers that there are simply too many for predators to eat, and the long periods between their emergences keeps predator populations low. A large brood of seventeen-year cicadas is emerging in the Middle-Atlantic and Midwest states in 2021.

The name cicada is from Latin and echoic, an imitation of the insect’s sound.

Pliny the Elder has a passage on cicadas in his Natural History. Written by 77 C.E., the passage reads, in part:

Similis cicadis vita, quarum duo genera: minores quae primae proveniunt et novissimae pereunt—sunt autem mutae; sequens est volatura earum3 quae canunt: vocantur achetae et, quae minores ex his sunt, tettigonia, sed illae magis canorae. mares canunt in utroque genere, feminae silent.

(The life-history of the cicada is similar. Of this there are two kinds: the smaller ones that come out first and perish latest—these however are mute; subsequent is the flight of those that sing: they are called Singers, and the smaller ones among them grass-hoppers, but the former are more vocal. The males in either class sing, but the females are silent.)

Virgil makes a more poetic reference to cicadas in his Eclogue 5, composed c.40 B.C.E.:

Haec tibi semper erunt, et cum sollemnia vota
reddemus Nymphis, et cum lustrabimus agros.
dum iuga montis aper, fluvios dum piscis amabit,
dumque thymo pascentur apes, dum rore cicadae,
semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt.
ut Baccho Cererique, tibi sic vota quotannis
agricolae facient; damnabis tu quoque votis

(These rites shall be yours for ever, both when we pay our yearly vows to the Nymphs, and when we purify our fields. So long as the boar loves the mountaintops, and the fish the streams; so long as the bees feed on thyme and the cicadas on dew—so long shall your honour, name, and glory abide. As to Bacchus and Ceres, so to you, year after year, shall the husbandmen pay their vows; you, too, shall hold them to their vows.)

The word cicada appears in English in the fourteenth century. John Trevisa’s c.1387 translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum has this:

There is a maner grashoppere þat hatte cicada and haþ þat name of canendo “syngynge,” for wiþ a ful litil throte he[o] schapiþ a wondirful song, as hit is isaide in Exameron. This cicada in þe myddel hete at mydday whanne treen brekep wiþ hete, þanne þe more clere eyre sche draweþ, þe more clereliche sche syngep. Also ȝif a man hielde oyle vpon þis cicadas he dieþ anone for þe poores þep istoppid þat þey may nouȝt drawe breeþ. But ȝif me hielde vppon hem vynegre anon, þanne þay beeþ onlyue anon, for þe strengpe of þe vynegre openeþ hooles and pores þat weren istoppid by byndynge of oyle, as Ambrose seiþ.

(There is a manner of grasshopper that is called cicada and has the name of canendo “singing,” for with a very small throat she shapes a wonderful song, as it is said in the Hexameron. This cicada in the middle heat at midday when trees break with heat, then the more clear air she draws, the more clearly she sings. Also, if a man pours oil upon these cicadas they soon die for the pores are stopped so that they may not draw breath. But if I quickly pour vinegar upon them, then they are soon alive, for the strength of the vinegar opens holes and pores that were stopped by the binding of oil, as Ambrose says.)

Cicadas are ugly critters, and, when they emerge in great numbers, they can be annoying, but they are, in the words of Douglas Adams, mostly harmless.

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Sources:

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. cicada, -e, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cicada, n.

Pliny. Natural History, Books 8–11, second edition. H. Rackham, trans. Loeb Classical Library 353. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983, 11.32, 488–89.

Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum, vol. 1 of 3. M.C. Seymour, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 12.14, 625. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Virgil. “Eclogue 5” Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, revised edition.. H. Rushton Fairclough, trans. G.P. Goold, revisions. Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999, lines 74–80, 58–59.

Image credit: David Wilton, 2021.

mondegreen

14 May 2021

A 1592 “vendetta portrait” of James Stewart, the second Earl of Moray, painted to keep alive the memory of his murder. The body of a naked, dead man with a burial shroud strategically laid across his loins, showing wounds on his face, torso, and leg, and the words “God revenge my caus” written above.

What is a mondegreen you ask? It is a misheard song lyric (or other utterance), one where the phonemes can be interpreted to have an entirely different meaning than what the lyricist intended. Some examples include:

• “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear” (Gladly the Cross I’d Bear), from the hymn of that title

• “A girl with colitis goes by” (a girl with kaleidoscope eyes), from Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds, by the Beatles

• “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” (excuse me while I kiss the sky), from Purple Haze, by Jimi Hendrix

• “Who knows what evil lurks in the hot cement” (who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men), catchphrase for the radio show The Shadow

And my personal favorite:

• “He suffered under a bunch of spiders” (He suffered under Pontius Pilate), from the Apostle’s Creed

Mondegreen was coined by writer Sylvia Wright in 1954 in regard to a misheard lyric from her childhood. The song in question was the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl o’ Moray”:

Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands
     O where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,
     And hae laid him on the green.

The ballad is about the death of James Stewart, the second Earl of Moray, who was murdered in February 1591/92 by George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly.

In the November 1954 issue of Harper’s magazine, Wright described how, as a child, she misheard the lyrics to that ballad:

WHEN I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

     Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
    Oh, where hae ye been?
    They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
    And Lady Mondegreen.

I saw it all clearly. The Earl had yellow curly hair and a yellow beard and of course wore a kilt. He was lying in a forest clearing with an arrow in his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her long, dark brown curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark green dress embroidered with light green leaves outlined in gold. It had a low neck trimmed with white lace (Irish lace, I think). An arrow had pierced her throat: from it blood trickled down over the lace. Sunlight coming through the leaves made dappled shadows on her cheeks and her closed eyelids. She was holding the Earl's hand.

It made me cry.

[...]

By now, several of you more alert readers are jumping up and down in your impatience to interrupt and point out that, according to the poem, after they killed the Earl of Murray, they laid him on the green. I know about this, but I won't give in to it. Leaving him to die all alone without even anyone to hold his hand—I won't have it.

The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original.

Within a few years mondegreen had entered into the psychological literature. From Robert Reiff and Martin Scheerer’s 1959 Memory and Hypnotic Age Regression:

In giving the Pledge of Allegiance test to the control and to the experimental subjects, we expected and predicted that at experimental age ten the regressed subjects would use more improper wording (Mondegreenisms) in writing the Pledge than the simulators would. [...] An example of improper wording is “One nation invisible.”

The term mondegreen, however, doesn’t appear again in mainstream print sources for almost two decades. Either it continued quietly in oral use or it disappeared, only to be remembered and revived in 1973 by Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith. He wrote the following in an 18 March 1973 piece that was syndicated in papers throughout the United States:

Charlotte Bernard of Los Angeles recalls a special kind of malapropism called a Mondegreen, derived from the author Sylvia Wright’s memories of a Scottish ballad her mother used to sing [....] As a child, Miss Wright always heard the last two lines as “Ye have slain the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen.” Thus the Mondegreen—a misheard phrase from a poem or song, such as “Lead me not into Penn Station,” and “Oh, say can you see by the Donzerly Light.”

And as we are reminded by David Curtis, of the English department at Corona del Mar High School—“Hollywood be Thy name.”

And in a 27 May 1979 New York Times Magazine column on malapropisms, metanalyses, and folk etymologies, William Safire wrote:

What all-inclusive term can we use to encompass the changes that our brains make in the intended meaning of what we hear? Linguists suggest “homophone,” “unwitting paronomasia” and “agnominatio,” but those terms sound like fancified dirty words to me.

I prefer “mondegreen.” This is a word coined in a 1954 Harper’s Magazine article, “The Death of Lady Mondegreen” by Sylvia Wright.

And he concludes with a plea for readers to stop sending him examples:

Thanks to responsive readers, I have a column on sound effects and whole closetful of mondegreens. But a nuff is a nuff.

Unlike Safire, if you have any good ones, send them my way.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Mackie, R.L., ed. “The Bonny Earl o’ Moray.” A Book of Scottish Verse, second edition. London: Oxford UP, 1967, 143. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2019, s.v. mondegreen, n.

Reiff, Robert and Martin Scheerer. Memory and Hypnotic Age Regression. New York: International Universities Press, 1959, 126–27. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Safire, William. “On Language: I Led the Pigeons to the Flag.” New York Times Magazine, 27 May 1979, 9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Smith, Jack. “A Hobby Paceoff in Diffidence.” Los Angeles Times, 18 March 1973, D1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Wright, Sylvia. “The Death of Lady Mondegreen.” Harper’s, November 1954, 48–49. Harpers.org.

Image credit: Anonymous artist, 1592. Public domain image.