1. Etymology of the word mondegreen:
In a 1954 essay in
Harper's Magazine, [Sylvia] Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the last line of the first stanza from the seventeenth-century ballad
The Bonnie Earl o' Moray. She wrote:
When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's
Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the earl o' Moray
And
Lady Mondegreen.
The correct fourth line is "And
laid him on the green".
(from Wikipedia, s.v. Mondegreen)
2. Ninas (#24) '
As a child, I used to look carefully at Al Hirshfield's amazing caricatures in the Sunday New York Herald Tribune, and then as an adult in the New York Times, to see if I could spot all the Ninas. At some point he started adding a numeral next to his name to indicate to his fans how many Ninas there were in the drawing.
3. Speaking of the crossword ninas, Arnold Schwarzenegger (when he was governor of California) once included
fuck you as an acrostic in
a letter in which he vetoed a bill proposed by the state legislature.
