Mairzy Doats

Mairzy Doats
by Milton Drake, Al Hoffman and Jerry Livingston

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wooden shoe?
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wooden shoe?

Wow. Both spell-check and grammar-check on Word are lit up like a Christmas tree. Just about every word is flagged. But what the heck: it’s Fun-Time Friday! And more than that, today only comes around every four years. Happy Leap Day, everyone! My daughter’s step-sister is “six” today: happy birthday, Jessica!

Today’s song was a huge hit in the 1940’s (more on that in a bit). It was on everyone’s lips for years and, I think, still permeates our collective consciousness today. The bouncy little tune plays a perfect counterpoint to the nonsensical syllables. As the singer repeats them over and over, we begin to wonder: Did they swallow too much Pepsodent? Should they switch to Sanka? Are they speaking in tongues? But then the bridge of the song makes it all clear:

If the words sound queer and funny to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey,
Sing "Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy."

And, armed with that knowledge, we can figure out for ourselves that, “A kid’ll eat ivy, too. Wouldn’t you?"

My cousin and I were driving through Fort Worth several years ago. We passed a church and the marquée read:

JUDGE NOTY OUR FRIEND
UNTIL YOU STAND IN HIS PLACE

Undeterred by the curious grammatical construction, I envisioned Judge Noty, a fine, upstanding member of the church, probably a deacon or elder. He was most likely retiring from the bench and they were having a “Judge Noty Day” at church. I could almost smell the fried chicken from the dinner on the grounds when my cousin remarked that those were good words to remember. Seeing my quizzical expression, she explained that the letters on the sign had moved and that it was an admonition to “Judge not your friend . . .”

Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” British author Lynne Truss takes a “zero tolerance approach to punctuation” in her best-selling book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Given that she approaches her subject matter so seriously, I was delighted to find that the book is enormously entertaining. Here’s how she explains the book’s title.

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

So punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.

Ms Truss’ book is filled with such examples. I’ll play optometrist on this one. Is it better like this?

A woman without her man is nothing.

Or like this?

A woman! Without her, man is nothing.

The inspiration for Mairzy Doats came from an English nursery rhyme that begins, “Cowzy tweet and sowzy tweet and liddle sharksy doisters.” (Isn’t it amazing that, now that you know the “secret” to the song, the whole “Cowzy tweet” line becomes easily readable? Kind of like in The Matrix when those guys could see the whole big picture just by looking at those green letters and numbers.) Milton Drake’s four-year old daughter came home from school one day, saying the rhyme. Mr Drake and his buddies, Messrs Hoffman and Livingston, first just set the “cowzy tweet” verse to music, but then decided to write new lyrics instead.

I understand that the earliest versions of the New Testament (in Greek) were also punctuational nightmares – as is this sentence, I suppose. There were no periods, commas, or carriage returns (remember those?). Sometimes, even spaces between the Greek words were lacking. Thanks be to God for the painstaking effort of the scribes and monks who also “saw the whole big picture”. They parsed and punctuated, set verses and chapters, and even found time to illustrate the pages. It’s amazing, though, that the beginning of John’s gospel is crystal clear: no punctuation was needed – “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

Mairzy Doats was recorded by “Al Trace and his Silly Symphonists” in 1943. Then, it went all the way to number one with a recording by the “Merry Macs” in 1944. Spike Jones, of course, could not leave well enough alone, and his band’s version gilded the lily with their trademark sound effects. The song lifted the spirits of servicemen in World War II. What I find really fascinating is that phrases from the song were used as passwords in the War. Who else but a Yank (or maybe a Brit) would have any idea of the proper response?

We were blessed to have Rev. Will Robinson back at church this week. Will was an Associate Pastor a few years ago and he is now working on his PhD at Union Seminary in Richmond. Will spoke at our noontime Lenten Series about “The Holy Spirit.” It was a great talk, and it got me thinking about how we sometimes give the Holy Spirit the short end of the stick – even in my charisma-laden hometown of Tulsa.

It does seem that we often punctuate the Trinity as:

FATHER, SON . . . andholyghost.

I know that the Holy Spirit isn’t mentioned as often by name in the Bible, but He is what makes it a “Trinity”, after all, and not just a “Duality”. Some theologians refer to the Holy Spirit as the “shy” member of the Trinity, but when Jesus tells his disciples (and us) that “you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes”, I believe the word He uses for “power” is the same one where we get our word “dynamite.” Maybe, as Mr Twain might say, it’s time we learned to distinguish between a lightning bug and lightning when it comes to the Holy Spirit. May the Lord bless you this weekend:

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.