CESAREM LEGATOS ALACREM EORUM

I’ll have to track that one down!

There is also an excellent collection of English nursery rhymes (which a friend once lent me) transliterated into spoof medieval French.

I think the following by Tim Martin in the Telegraph 13 Jun 2009 refers:

“Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames, by the American Luis van Rooten, is a very odd book: one of those rare works so peculiar and inspired that one wonders simultaneously how it ever got into print and how it ever fell out. Try reading the following lines aloud in your very best French accent: “Un petit d’un petit/ S’étonne aux Halles …” Or these: “Chacun Gille/ Houer ne taupe ne hile/ Tôt-fait, j’appèlle au boiteur.”

While the French translates as gibberish, English readers with a knowledge of children’s nursery rhymes and a good enough ’Allo ’Allo! accent will begin to notice familiar shades of “Humpty Dumpty” and “Jack and Jill”.

The mad humour of the book goes far beyond such artfully mixed-up Mother Goose. The entire thing is a parody of a medieval manuscript, littered with fake woodcuts and pompous academic annotations on the rhymes themselves. “Reine, reine, gueux éveille / Gomme à gaine, en horreur, taie” is sedulously translated above an illustration of a beaming monarch as “Queen, queen, arouse the rabble / Who use their girdles, horrors, as pillowslips”.

Thanks for the links. The mondegreen phenomenon is in fact a more common factor in the development of languages than we may realise nowadays, when averyone can read. Mis-hearing according to familiar sounds explains the disgregation of Latin into the Romance languages, each built on the languages of the pre-Roman inhabitants.

I love children’s misinterpretations, too, and ‘mondegreen’ is an excellent coinage. I wonder if we’ll ever find it in a puzzle

I didn’t finish this, having put in ‘sedan’ for ‘satin’, without much thought, and being unfamiliar with the term ‘guncotton’.

I found Betty Martin by Googling ‘all my eye’, which I did know, and spent a while reading various theories as to her origin. I’m inclined to favour ‘beata Mater’, as the accent on ‘Martine’ would be on the second syllable.

Not being as allergic to anagrams as some, I found this an enjoyable, and informative, puzzle.

Thanks Everyman and Arthur, and a happy bank holiday to those of you in the UK

I enjoyed this puzzle despite your reservations about the number of anagrams, and the surfaces, as usual, were excellent. Among(st) lots of good clues, I liked ANDANTE plus IDIOM was well-hidden.

As to 9,10 I hadn’t hear of the expression either although I have heard it said “a lot of my eye”. I messed up the anagram by assuming that the second word was ‘BY’ instead of ‘MY’ and in the end had to resort to actually solving the anagram rather than just guessing it.

cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl O’ Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

I only came across this word a few years ago but it was coined in the 1950s. I imagine that lots of ‘such errors’ have simply been concocted for fun including at least two about bears.

Others have already highlighted my favourites.

Thanks for the source. I’ve come across ‘all my eye’ and other expressions like ‘a load of eyewash’. The idea of a Latin derivation of some sort seems plausible. I remember someone joking after an after-dinner grace (Benedicto benedicatur) ‘What’s all that about Bennie the Dictator?’, though not surprisingly it never caught on!

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=234

I thought 5dn was a nicely constructed clue.