An eggcorn sighting: check out the number of Google hits for the word "grueways", all in the context of a song from The Sound of Music that frequently appears on lyrics websites as:
You are 16 going on 17
Fellows will fall in line
Eager young lads
And grueways and cads
Will offer you food and wine
In brief, this is a mistaken transcription of "roués" (listen at 0:47 in the above video). What makes it an eggcorn, and interesting, is that it's not merely an error, but transforms an unknown word into something semantically meaningful for the context: in this case, presumably the idea that it refers to some kind of gruesome creepy person or monster. You certainly wouldn't want to run into a "grueway" on a dark night.
This illustrates one of the downsides of the ease of propagation of Internet material: like quotation websites, music lyric websites copy promiscuously and indiscriminately from each other, and wrong lyrics spread very rapidly without much mechanism for error correction.
- Ray
Further to Autour-du-mondegreens - the process of transliterating one language into another (deliberately or otherwise) - here's "Ken Lee", Valentina Hasan's take on Mariah Carey's cover of Without You on the Bulgarian Music Idol show.
Но уан кен ту кен ту сивмен.
Но йон клиз тожу маливе.
Уен ай гез ажу завате на налечу мо.
Ню йонуз тунай молинай
йон сора шооо.
Йес и шооо, ооо.
Кен лии,
тулибу дибу даучу.
Кен ли,
Кен ли межу мо.
Кен ли,
тулибу дибу даучу.
Кен ли,
Кен ли межу мо.
Or, transliterated back into English:
No one ken to ken to sivmen,
nor yon clees toju maliveh.
When i gez aju zavateh na nalechoo more,
new yonooz tonigh molinigh,
Yon sorra shooo,
yes ee shooo, ooo.
Ken leee
tulibu dibu douchoo
Ken Lee,
Ken lee meju more.
Ken Lee
tulibu dibu douchoo
Ken Lee,
Ken lee meju more.
This isn't strictly an autour-du-mondegreen; Ms Hasan was trying to reproduce the English song phonetically rather than make it into Bulgarian words (and furthermore working from a tape, without even the benefit of visual cues). Given an unknown song, even native speakers often find such a task difficult, as evidenced by the prevalence of mondegreens. Still, the overall effect is rather like the strange chorus of the 2002 Spanish disco hit The Ketchup Song by Las Ketchup.
Aserejé ja de jé de jebe
tu de jebere sebiunouva
majabi an de bugui
an de buididipí
This attracted some bizarre speculation, including the meme that it concealed a Satanic message (see the Internet Archive for example commentary). The reality is merely that the song is about Diego, a Spanish Rastafarian gypsy who wants to be a hip hop performer but, knowing no English, garbles into Spanish phonotactics the words of the classic 1979 Rapper's Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang:
I said a hip hop, the hippie, the hippie
do the hip hip hop, a you don't stop
the rockin' to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie
to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat
I notice we just got in Luis van Rooten's 1967 book Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames, which does the same with nursery rhymes: transliterating the English into reasonably coherent French phrases, then applying scholarly commentary (see examples). I haven't read it for years, but remember it as very good: I'll have a proper look when I'm next on duty.
Addendum. Yep: it's great fun (especially if you like pastiches of the kinds of academic texts whose footnotes are longer than the text they're commenting on). For instance, the cover example about the most famous omelette of history:
Un petit d'un petit 1
S'étonne aux Halles 2
Un petit d'un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent 3
Indolent qui ne sort cesse 4
Indolent qui ne se mène 5
Qu'importe un petit d'un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes. 6
1. The inevitable result of a child marriage. 2. The subject of this epigrammatic poem is obviously from the provinces, since a native Parisian would take this famous old market for granted. 3. Since this personage bears no titles, we are led to believe that the poet writes of one of those unfortunate idiot-children than in olden days existed as a living skeleton in their family's closet. I am inclined to believe, however, that this is a fine piece of misdirection and that the poet is actualy writing of some famous political prisoner, or the illegitimate offspring of some noble house. The Man in the Iron Mask, perhaps? 4,5. Another misdirection. Obviously it was not laziness that prevented this person's going out and taking himself places. 6. He was obviously prevented from fulfilling his destiny, since his is compared to Gai de Reguennes. This was a young squire (to one of his uncles, a Gaillard of Normandy) who died at the tender age of twelve of a surfeit of Saracen arrows before the walls of Acre in 1191.
A loose translation (not in the book) might be:
A child of a child Amazed at Les Halles. A child of a child. Ah! Disgrace befalls you. A lazy one that gets out constantly. A lazy one who can be fought. Never mind a child of a child, All Gai de Reguennes.
Recommended; and interesting: I didn't realise the author, the late Luis van Rooten (1906-1973), had such a multifaceted career. A Mexican-born character actor who was typecast, as was often the case, into sleazy and villainous movie roles - see IMDb - he was also a radio actor, horticulturalist, artist and writer. Wikipedia lists his other books as Van Rooten's Book of Improbable Saints (Viking, 1975 - more multilingual puns via spoof hagiographies such as those of Sainte Maladie Endemique de Foie and Saint Cedilla Onderzee), and the gardening spoof The Floriculturist's Vade Mecum of Exotic and Recondite Plants, Shrubs and Grasses, and One Malignant Parasite (Doubleday, 1973).
I remember from years back encountering some purportedly French poems and their translations. For instance: Reine, reine, gueux éville / Gomme àgaine, en horreur, taie (Queen, queen, arose the rabble / Who use their girdles, horrors, as pillow slips). Some obscure rhyme from the French Revolution? No, it comes a 1967 book by Louis d'Antin van Rooten, Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames, which is a compilation of a supposed "d'Antin Manuscript" - actually English nursery rhymes translated into French spelling and accompanies them with scholarly notes (see some examples here).
The always excellent Language Log, a weblog written by professors of linguistics and closely related fields, mentioned this book recently, and took an excursion into the whole territory of this cross-language play. See Autour-du-mondegreens: bunkum unbound. "Mondegreens" are mishearings of song lyrics; the name derives, as Mondegreens: A Short Guide explains, from the Anerican writer Sylvia Wright hearing a line in the folksong Lord Moray as They had slain the Earl of Moray / And Lady Mondegreen (actually they laid him on the green).
Language Log looks at the phenomenon when the source is in another language. While such mishearings can be spontaneous, there's also a popular genre in deliberating deconstructing songs into pseudo-English for comic effect. One Tamil choreographer, actor and film director Prabhu Deva Sundaram, is now widely known in the West as "Benny Lava" after such treatment of the vid of his Bollywood-style song Kalluri Vaanil (there's a somewhat out-of-synch proper translation here). Some of the English words are non-accidental, songs in Indian films being generally macaronic; the song comes from a movie featuring a love story between medical students, hence the words "stethoscope", "scanning" and "operation".
