AZYGON but not forgotten, we turn from those poor orphan anomalies in last week's column to the mondegreen, a different creature entirely.

It's Rob Williams's idea, though there are worldwide websites overrun by the pesky little perishers.

A mondegreen is a misheard lyric, John Virgin featuring every Christmas in one of the best known examples. "Round John Virgin, mother and child..." The term is credited to the writer Sylvia Wright, who in 1954 discovered a chronic misunderstanding of the words of The Bonny Earl of Moray, a well known Scottish ballad. It wasn't "Oh they have slain the Earl of Moray and Lady Mondegreen" - as, romantically, she had long imagined - but "Oh they have slain the Earl of Moray and laid him on the green." Other multiple mondegreens include "The ants are my friend" (which may help explain why Bob Dylan was Blowing in the Wind), Jimi Hendrix's line "Excuse me while I kiss the sky" - widely believed to be wanting to kiss this guy - and, they swear, the Credence Clearwater Revival number about the bad moon rising on the right. Or bathroom rising on the right, as the case may be.

The Oxford English Dictionary declines to acknowledge them, however, abstemiously offering little between Mondayish ("Affected with the indisposition often felt by clergymen on Mondays") and mondongo which, perhaps pertinently, is a dish of tripe.

Rob Williams, in Newcastle, knows someone who believed that in The Battle Hymn of the Republic they were trampling on the vintage where the great giraffes are stored and that it was Olive the Other Reindeer who used to laugh and call Rudolph names.

Lynn de Prator in Darlington - secretary of the International Dave Clark Five Fan Club - says that her brother translated Bits and Pieces into bags of pizzas. It is also supposed - and these things can become a little implausible - that the Beatles lyric about the girl with kaleidoscope eyes referred to the girl with colitis going by. There are many mondegreenfield sites, nonetheless. Genuine examples greatly welcomed.

WHEN the mondegreens had sufficiently been stewed, the pub conversation on Monday lunchtime inched towards naff lyrics.

The Guardian, or some similarly hip organ, ran a competition several years since to find the most strained rhyme in popular musical history - won by the length of Tin Pan Alley by a brutal snatch from Neil Diamond:

I am I said, to no one there

And no one heard at all

Not even the chair.

The pub clamed a North-East postulant. The LP was entitled From Langley Park to Memphis - a late 1980s best seller, apparently - the band was called Prefab Sprout, the lead singer Paddy McAloon and the chorus something about "Hot dogs, jumping frogs, Alberquerque."

Only a pedant would suggest that "frogs" doesn't quite rhyme with "Alberquerque". Gadfly once spent a reckless night at Hartlepool dogs with a chap called Paddy McAloon, former Durham poliss. Him and Malcolm Pickering and Mike Williams, Spennymoor lad, who now owns several swish hotels hereabouts.

Was it the same McAloon, perhaps, or his son or a coincidence twice removed? A pint turns at 33 and a third on the outcome.

STILL amid the definitive articles, the column's eye was caught by a page of classifieds in The Wearside Roar, a Sunderland FC fanzine.

Not only may TWR be the only football magazine in Britain to feature forthcoming church services - Tid, Mid, Misere, Carling, Palm and Paste Egg Day - but there's an attendant quiz, too. What, it asks - win a T-shirt - does that rather mongrel doggerel mean?

Last Sunday was Carling Sunday, of course, two weeks before Easter. The legend of the ship wrecked off Cullercoats, or some similarly famished North-East port in a storm, is probably familiar.

But how is "carling" correctly to be spelt? Mr David Simpson, cooking grey peas in his Burning Questions column a couple of weeks back, also included the final "g". So, perfidiously, does the dear old Oxford Dictionary, though "carlin" is added as an afterthought.

There's even a 1744 reference to "feasting on sybows and rifarts and carlings", though what a rifart might be can only, mischievously, be imagined.

The column, on these annual excursions, will continue to use "carlin". Carling is Black Label and though similarly flatulent, is a different thing altogether.

PAUL Dobson, a columnist (memory suggests) on one of the other Sunderland fanzines, took himself from Bishop Auckland to Stanhope on Sunday and found it "surprisingly busy" amid the crisis.

In a shop window, however, the aberrant apostrophe had also spread out of control:

Special offer's

Ladie's brief's £1

Bra's £1

Assorted tight's £3.

A contagion, alas, for which there seems no remedy whatever.

SHERLOCK Holmes, it may be recalled, remarked that a man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he was likely to use and put the rest away in the lumber room of his library.

Finding this mental cupboard bare, therefore, Kevin O'Beirne in Sunderland has been around the charity shop.

Holmes and Watson, we said last week, lived at 23a Baker Street - which probably explains why the key wouldn't turn in the lock. The punchline need not be repeated, but they actually lived at 22b.

Kevin also points out Watson's North-East connection. After completing his army surgeons' course, he was attached to the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers as assistant surgeon, though later seconded to the Berkshires with whom he was wounded at the Battle of Maiwand which (says Kevin) led indirectly to his meeting with The Great Detective.

Excellent, I cried. Elementary, said he.

POOR Watson might have fared better in the Gurkhas, not least the detachment presently stationed at Catterick. Even in mufti, the average British squaddie may be recognised by his uniform loutishness - his feet on the bus seats, his stomach all over the pavement and the eructating air around him a sort of army and navy blue. The Gurkha is equally distinguishable. He's the one who wears jacket and tie and who looks as smart as a 22 carat, the one who holds open the doors in the Cornmill Centre, who smiles shyly, proceeds quietly and who has manifest pride in his regiment. Our lads may be equally formidable in the front line - but there's no question who you'd rather have alongside you on the number 27 bus to the Garrison.

MUCH remains unsaid, not least the reaction to last week's piece on the dangerous road over the East Coast main railway line near Croft autodrome. Space decrees delay. That, and perhaps more mondegreenery - where God paints the scenery - next week.

Published: Wednesday, April 04, 2001