Agent Z and the Holy Toast
Jun 18th, 2007 by Fenevad
Just for fun, I thought I’d mention a couple of funny things I’d heard lately. We have a little boy in my son’s primary class who always talks about the “Holy Toast” and my seven-year-old daughter today asked me why we always talk about “Agent Z” in church. (For what it’s worth, my kids were watching Buzz Lightyear: Star Command: The Adventure Begins and one of the bad guys in it is called “Agent Z”.) These little mishearings are called mondegreens, which comes from an (apocryphal?) mishearing of “and laid him on the green” as “and Lady Mondegreen.” They occur where we mishear something and come up with a phonetically similar reading of the sounds that yields different words. As another example, I recently read on another blog (I can’t remember where now) about someone who blessed his baby with a “love of fine cheeses.” People commented on how silly this was until another poster pointed out that he had probably actually said “love to find Jesus,” which seems a little more likely (although I have to say that I loved the specificity of the first version: maybe the father was a dairyman?).
What other mondegreens have you heard in church?
(By the way, my wife lays claim to the kid’s book title Agent Z and the Holy Toast, so if anyone steals it, you’ll have to answer to her. 
)
Just for the real language geeks out there, I’ll finish by mentioning that processes like mondegreenization (is that a word?) can actually change the language. Historically the Hungarian word for hypocrite was képmutáló ‘picture changer’ (i.e., your picture changes depending on where you are), but somewhere along the line people heard it as képmutátó ‘picture shower’ (i.e., you present a picture to the world [that isn’t what you really are]), and thus it has become in modern Hungarian. I don’t know which one makes more sense (they’re both equally clear to me), but you can see how reinterpretations like this could happen if people mishear something and come up with a reasonable interpretation.
I just finished writing this post and showed it to my wife. She remembered one published in the Friend that talked about a kid singing I Am a Child of God with the line “and given me an earthly home with parents kind of weird.”
There is a well-worn joke (sometimes presented as having been heard by a FoaF) that touches on this. Well, it isn’t really an example of what Fenevad is talking about here, but it’s funny enough to share. A woman gets up in testimony meeting and starts talking about how her husband had an operation on his scrotum (she keeps repeating that word, which makes the story work). She goes on and on (the details vary with each re-telling I have heard) about how the problems with this part of her husband’s anatomy interfered with his recreation his work, etc., and how grateful she was that the Lord helped them find a solution. Everyone in the congregation is, of course, shocked and embrassed and totally clueless about what to do. She finishes and her husband gets up. He says “I have one thing to say to my wife: sternum.” I’m sure that this story isn’t original to the LDS context, but it works well in a testimony meeting setting.
Also, when I was a kid I thought that “shallmenno” was some sort of sign or signal or conferral of authority: “By this ’shallmenno,’ ye are my disciples.”
Costanza, I’m shocked! It’s the ice-block for you buddy!
I’m already there. Yowsa
Not the right church, but when my sister was a kid, she thought the line from “Silent Night,” “‘Round yon virgin” was “Round young virgin,” and that it was a description of Mary’s physical appearance right after having a baby.
Your kids probably want to know why they should free agent Z.
I thought the same thing about shallmenno (and its related “ellemenno” from the Alphabet song) and “round young virgin” just made sense to me for some reason — probably because I grew up thinking that a virgin was a pregnant woman, since that’s what Mary was. I also wondered why we shouted “yoo-hoo” unto Jesus (I think they changed the words of that hymn).
Not LDS-specific, but several funny ones from my wife: she was working at a finance company and wrote on a form “tax ride off” because she always thought it was a saying like taxes rode off into the sunset. She also thought people got off “scotch free” (without any sticky tape) and that we lived in a doggie-dog world (as opposed to dog-eat-dog).
By the way, Fen — maybe you already know this, but this is how John Johnson came up with the phrase “medialogical legends.” A grad student was talking to him about etiological legends in the media, and — well — you know John — he heard what he heard and he loved it.
Kuri, when I was first learning German I didn’t know that the word Birne ‘pear’, and heard the phrase “nur das traute hochheilige Paar” (’only the trusted high-holy pair [i.e. Mary and Jesus]’) in the original German version of the song as referring to a pear (this is an example of what it sometime called a “false friend”: a word that looks like its the same as a word in another language, but means something different). I thus thought that Mary was being compared to a fruit and when I asked my teacher why the song called Mary a fruit, she got mad at me: she thought I was being a wiseacre and making fun of Mary’ post-delivery figure and the Nativity (even though I think she should have know me well enough to know I wouldn’t do that). Ever since then I have to admit that the song (in English or German) makes me think of pears…
Glenn, sounds like John. In recent years you never know what he’ll get out of what you say…
I grew up Catholic in Pennsylvania and would always end the Lord’s prayer, “but deliver us from Eagles”. What can I say, my dad was a Giants fan.
When I was young and foolish, I used to think it was “forgive us our sins, as we forgive our debtors.”
I found this among the submissions that were never posted for my old online folklore collection:
Ditto:
And another:
And another:
This one might be my favorite:
Glenn, not a mondegreen, but these remind me of when, as a child, I used to say prayers and ask Heavenly Father to bless our neighbor’s backhoe…
Well if you’re going to be picky, Jimminy Cricket is Pinnochio, not Peter Pan
But, #12 is a mondegreen, and the rest just snowballed from there (#15 might be, too, in a way).
The others were just so darn cute. The Thomas Trains — I can just imagine my 3 1/2 year-old’s face light up if he made that connection.
There was a kid in my ward growing up who, instead of amen, used to say m&m. He knew what he was doing, though.
When I first joined the church, the elders happened to say something about “sister missionaries.” I thought how nice it was that siblings could go on missions together.
And after getting involved in the Young Adult program, I used to hear a lot of people say, “So and so is up at the Y.” I couldn’t quite figure out why Mormons spent so much time at the YMCA.
When I watched Three’s Company when I was a kid I heard Jack say that he was going to go stay at the “Y.” I thought he was going to BYU, which I thought was cool because that’s where my big brother was.
The woman who creates and distributes our Relief Society Program made reference to the Bishop Brick who was hosting a Pioneer Breakfast for the ward. I guess with all of the talking of the church as our foundation, and Christ as the cornerstone, etc., it’s not too crazy to think of the Bishop and his counselors as bricks . . .
[…] made a recent reference to the TV Show Three’s Company (“Come and knock on our door…”). My initial reaction when I […]
One more from today, but not Church related: we were up in Indianapolis today for a doctor’s appointment and my son came to an automatic door in the hospital. As he walked up to it he said “Open accessories!” and it slid open.