¹ and we definitely don't need to go there and find out why---believe me we don't!

² Dawkins never actually claimed that last bit about the jingles, but I bet he wished he had.

³ Though with the opposite effect---if you think about it.

¹ After it had been distainfully rejected by Colley Cibber and the Drury-Lane theatre

² And that’s without even calling it the ‘Bugger’s Opera’ in a brilliantly obscure reference to Sir John Betjeman’s Ghastly Good Taste.

³ Compare written Chinese with, on the one hand spoken Chinese, and on the other written Japanese of the Kanji persuasion; or again compare all those foolish jokes and 'pomes' one sees, often circulating on the internet and perpetrated by the illiterate or at least the etymologically challenged, that claim that English spelling is illogical.

⁴ By Longfellow, or possibly Tallchap.

¹

And though I prefer the more ringing ‘inadvertent lapsarial contrafacta’ for the phenomenon, in her memory (even though it's a false one) we’ll stick to mondegreens.

Demimonde not so green?

Since researching this essay I have become just a little suspicious of the details of of Mistress Wright’s etymology: you see the version of the BEoM in my copy of Reliques has a “hae” inserted before “layed” so that unless Wright mater had a very slurred rendering of the line (surely she didn’t have to get that inebriated before delving into the book?) one wonders just where the heck the “hae” went to. And then again in Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany *, an earlier collection, we also find the line rendered with a “hae”; “hae”, of course, represents the Lalans for ‘have’ and since one vigorously shies away from the notion that, having slain the Earl, anyone then ‘had’ Lady Mondegreen, we must look elsewhere for our origin. Child is no help here since in his version (Number 181) we see not "hae" but "they"!
However I remember as an infant in school learning a version with a tune (see above), and more importantly a version which leaves out any “hae”s or “they”s, and I’m wondering if we are getting a glimpse of a phenomenon akin to someone seeing an article in say People Magazine or Entertainment Weekly and then discovering that it refers to something originally in Nature or Scientific American and henceforth claiming that that is really, really where they did see it first: really.
I mean “I misheard it when Mother read it to me from Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” is so much sexier than “I learned it wrong in grade school”
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* The original coffee table book

¹Angelica Puce
"twentieth century sinning..." No that is not an error, and it's certainly not something I want to discuss here.

¹ LatComSci Pun
"O Tempora! / O Mores! (Suusque lex inclitus!!)..." Let me assure you that this is by far my funniest joke ever! And it's my most brilliant pun, and the fact that it is probably totally incomprehensible hardly matters.

And anyway the pun ought to be a pretty obvious one to anyone well-versed in both the Classics and the Computer Sciences, combining as it does a reference to Gordon Moore and his famous Law about the speed of change in the computing world, and an equally famous passage from M. Tullius Cicero’s ORATIO QVA L. CATILINAM "O tempora, o mores! senatus haec intellegit, consul videt; hic tamen vivit. &c." (Shame on the age and on its principles! The senate is aware of these things; the consul sees them; and yet this man lives).

btw for another look at that lex moorish, and one from a quite different perspective see this essay .

¹ Perfectly illustrative of what this essay is about, be aware that I wrote all the quotations in it from memory, not looking at either the Tolkien or the originals: that wouldn't have been sporting---QED.

² In those brave days of yore literary education largely consisted in learning large chunks of poetry and prose, and skilled writing (in part) in being able to regurgitate and manipulate them at will and skilled reading in spotting the buggers at sight.
Then, in that golden age, if putative student had handed in work which was not entirely unoriginal the knowing, wise professor (who would most certainly be familiar with the unacknowledged attributions of the good bits) would kindly suggest work on your own bad bits. But now-a-days, now-a-days the poor fellow is more likely to feel blindsided.

³ always assuming that unworthy has ever entered such mind.

⁴ As you might have expected I heavily plagiarised myself* for this essay (since I’ve dealt with the Big P before) and so I've of course lazily and larcenously and freely ripped off all sorts of words and even some phrases and paragraphs from my earlier piece.

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*Though, come to think of it, CAN one plagiarise oneself even here and now?