Saints come marchin' in...

Shirley, good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all of the days of my life,

And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever…

Parent to child: “You behave, now!”

Child: “I am heyv!”

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands,

Oh, where hae ye been?

They hae slain the Earl Amurray

And Lady Mondegreen.

That last line is actually “laid him on the green” but was misheard.

And that’s the origin of the word “mondegreen” - which is a “mondegreen” in its own right.

A mondegreen is a word you hear that doesn’t make sense to you, so you fish around for ways to make it make sense, and come up with an original concoction.

Kids do it all the time:

And lead us not into Penn Station…

Give us this day our jelly bread…

But not just kids.

There’s a town in the Rheinland-Palatinate, in Germany, called Katsenelnbogen, which means “cat’s elbow.” (in modern day German it would be Katzenellbogen).

Once upon a time there was a Germanic tribe living in what is now Hesse, called the Chatti.

And overlooking the Rhein Valley is a mountain known as Melibokus, about 20 km south of Darmstadt. Some historians have speculated that “Katsenelnbogen” was a mondegreen of Chatti-Melibokus, but we’re now, obviously, pretty thick in the weeds.

Origin aside, Katsenelnbogen is the birthplace of a rabbi who took his name from the town, Meir Katsenellenbogen, in 1482. Meir, whose original name was Meir ben Isaac, achieved fame as the Rabbi of Venice, among other things, but is also credited (Wikipedia says this citation needs further accreditation) with being the ancestor of a number of notables, including Karl Marx, Martin Buber, David Halberstam, Felix Mendelssohn, and the British publisher, the Right Honorable George Weidenfeld, who may or may not be related to my neighbors, the Weidenfelds.

Also Eyran Katsenelenbogen, who, along with his friend, Tal Silber, gave a great one-piano-four-hands performance of “When the Saints Come Marchin’ in,” in ten different styles,  in Weifang, China, back in 2014.

And did you know that Mòzhātè, Xiāobāng, Lǐsītè, and Débiāoxī - or 莫扎特, 肖邦，李斯特，德彪西, if you prefer - are how you say Mozart, Chopin, Liszt and Debussy in Chinese?

But I’ll stop here.