The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. James Gleick

“What I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them.” She explained the idea and the word this way:

      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 Amurray,

      And Lady Mondegreen.

      There the word lay, for some time. A quarter-century later, William Safire discussed the word in a column about language in The New York Times Magazine. Fifteen years after that, Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, offered a brace of examples, from “A girl with colitis goes by” to “Gladly the cross-eyed bear,” and observed, “The interesting thing about mondegreens is that the mishearings are generally less plausible than the intended lyrics.” But it was not books or magazines that gave the word its life; it was Internet sites, compiling mondegreens by the thousands. The OED recognized the word in June 2004.

      A mondegreen is not a transistor, inherently modern. Its modernity is harder to explain. The ingredients—songs, words, and imperfect understanding—are all as old as civilization. Yet for mondegreens to arise in the culture, and for mondegreen to exist in the lexis, required something new: a modern level of linguistic self-consciousness and interconnectedness. People needed to mishear lyrics not just once, not just several times, but often enough to become aware of the mishearing as a thing worth discussing. They needed to have other such people with whom to share the recognition. Until the most modern times, mondegreens, like countless other cultural or psychological phenomena, simply did not need to be named. Songs themselves were not so common; not heard, anyway, on elevators and mobile phones. The word lyrics, meaning the words of a song, did not exist until the nineteenth century. The conditions for mondegreens took a long time to ripen. Similarly, the verb to gaslight now means “to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity”; it exists only because enough people saw the 1944 film of that title and could assume that their listeners had seen it, too. Might not the language Cawdrey spoke—which was, after all, the abounding and fertile language of Shakespeare—have found use for such a word? No matter: the technology for gaslight had not been invented. Nor had the technology for motion pictures.

      The lexis is a measure of shared experience, which comes from inter-connectedness. The number of users of the language forms only the first part of the equation: jumping in four centuries from 5 million English speakers to a billion. The driving factor is the number of connections between and among those speakers. A mathematician might say that messaging grows not geometrically, but combinatorially, which is much, much faster. “I think of it as a saucepan under which the temperature has been turned up,” Gilliver said. “Any word, because of the interconnectedness of the English-speaking world, can spring from the backwater. And they are still backwaters, but they have this instant connection to ordinary, everyday discourse.” Like the printing press, the telegraph, and the telephone before it, the Internet is transforming the language simply by transmitting information differently. What makes cyberspace different from all previous information technologies is its intermixing of scales from the largest to the smallest without prejudice, broadcasting to the millions, narrowcasting to groups, instant messaging one to one.

      This comes as quite an unexpected consequence of the invention of computing machinery. At first, that had seemed to be about numbers.

      Chapter Four

      To Throw the Powers of Thought into Wheel-Work (Lo, the Raptured Arithmetician)

       Light almost solar has been extracted from the refuse of fish; fire has been sifted by the lamp of Davy; and machinery has been taught arithmetic instead of poetry.

      —Charles Babbage (1832)

      NO ONE DOUBTED THAT Charles Babbage was brilliant. Nor did anyone quite understand the nature of his genius, which remained out of focus for a long time. What did he hope to achieve? For that matter, what, exactly, was his vocation? On his death in London in 1871 the Times obituarist declared him “one of the most active and original of original thinkers” but seemed to feel he was best known for his long, cranky crusade against street musicians and organ-grinders. He might not have minded. He was multifarious and took pride in it. “He showed great desire to inquire into the causes of things that astonish childish minds,” said an American eulogist. “He eviscerated toys to ascertain their manner of working.” Babbage did not quite belong in his time, which called itself the Steam Age or the Machine Age. He did revel in the uses of steam and machinery and considered himself a thoroughly modern man, but he also pursued an assortment of hobbies and obsessions—cipher cracking, lock picking, lighthouses, tree rings, the post—whose logic became clearer a century later. Examining the economics of the mail, he pursued a counterintuitive insight, that the significant cost comes not from the physical transport of paper packets but from their “verification”—the calculation of distances and the collection of correct fees—and thus he invented the modern idea of standardized postal rates. He loved boating, by which he meant not “the manual labor of rowing but the more intellectual art of sailing.” He was a train buff. He devised a railroad recording device that used inking pens to trace curves on sheets of paper a thousand feet long: a combination seismograph and speedometer, inscribing the history of a train’s velocity and all the bumps and shakes along the way.

      As a young man, stopping at an inn in the north of England, he was amused to hear that his fellow travelers had been debating his trade:

      “The tall gentleman in the corner,” said my informant, “maintained you were in the hardware line; whilst the fat gentleman who sat next to you at supper was quite sure that you were in the spirit trade. Another of the party declared that they were both mistaken: he said you were travelling for a great iron-master.”

      “Well,” said I, “you, I presume, knew my vocation better than our friends.”

      “Yes,” said my informant, “I knew perfectly well that you were in the Nottingham lace trade.”

      He might have been described as a professional mathematician, yet here he was touring the country’s workshops and manufactories, trying to discover the state of the art in machine tools. He noted, “Those who enjoy leisure can scarcely find a more interesting and instructive pursuit than the examination of the workshops of their own country, which contain within them a rich mine of knowledge, too generally neglected by the wealthier classes.” He himself neglected no vein of knowledge. He did become expert on the manufacture of Nottingham lace; also the use of gunpowder in quarrying limestone; precision glass cutting with diamonds; and all known uses of machinery to produce power, save time, and communicate signals. He analyzed hydraulic presses, air pumps, gas meters, and screw cutters. By the end of his tour he knew as much as anyone in England about the making of pins. His knowledge was practical and methodical. He estimated that a pound of pins required the work of ten men and women for at least seven and a half hours, drawing wire, straightening wire, pointing the wire, twisting and cutting heads from the spiral coils, tinning or whitening, and finally papering. He computed the cost of each phase in millionths of a penny. And he noted that this process, when finally perfected, had reached its last days: an American had invented an automatic machine to accomplish the same task, faster.

      Babbage invented his own machine, a great, gleaming engine of brass and pewter, comprising thousands of cranks and rotors, cogs and gearwheels, all tooled with the utmost precision. He spent his long life improving it, first in one and then in another incarnation, but all, mainly, in his mind. It never came to fruition anywhere else. It thus occupies an extreme and peculiar place in the annals of invention: a failure, and also one of humanity’s grandest intellectual achievements. It failed on a colossal scale, as a scientific-industrial project “at the expense of the nation, to be held as national property,” financed by the Treasury for almost twenty years, beginning in 1823 with a Parliamentary appropriation of £1,500 and ending in 1842, when the prime minister shut it down. Later, Babbage’s engine was forgotten. It vanished from the lineage of invention. Later still, however, it was rediscovered,