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QJM Advance Access originally published online on January 21, 2009
QJM 2009 102(4):301-302; doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcp002
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Physicians. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

When I Use a Word ... Words misheard: medical mondegreens

Jeff Aronson

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

                A girl with colitis goes by.

                With apologies to John Lennon and

                  Paul McCartney

I recently heard a Radio 3 announcer mention ‘Kodaly's Buttocks Pressing Song’. Could he have been referring to the great Hungarian composer's oratorio, the Psalmus Hungarsicus? Or was it ‘Bartok's Precious Song’, a homage to his illustrious contemporary, born in the year before him? Neither, as it turned out—it was ‘O could I but express in song’ by the Russian composer Leonid Malashkin. This kind of homophonic error is called a mondegreen.

I expect that few will have heard of the American journalist Sylvia Wright. In her day, she was a well-known contributor to magazines such as Harper's, Harper's Bazaar, and The Atlantic . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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