{"id":17563,"date":"2018-08-19T00:09:47","date_gmt":"2018-08-19T07:09:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17563"},"modified":"2018-08-19T00:10:10","modified_gmt":"2018-08-19T07:10:10","slug":"tisiphe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/08\/19\/tisiphe\/","title":{"rendered":"Tisiphe?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>In the English version of the song \u201cMadeleine,\u201d as performed in <cite>Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris<\/cite>, there\u2019s a couplet that I always thought went like this:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<div class=\"stanza\">\r\n<p>Madeleine\u2019s my Tisiphe;<\/p>\r\n<p>She\u2019s America to me.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>I\u2019ve been listening to the song, now and then, since the mid-\u201980s. I had a vague recollection that Tisiphe was someone from Greek mythology, and left it at that.<\/p>\r\n<p>But today I finally got curious and looked up Tisiphe, only to find that I had misremembered the name; I was probably thinking of Tisiphone, one of the Furies\/Erinyes. There doesn\u2019t appear to have been someone named Tisiphe.<\/p>\r\n<p>So what could the song be talking about? I finally took the daring step of looking up the lyrics. And discovered that the line is really \u201cMadeleine\u2019s my \u2018\u2019Tis of Thee,\u2019\u201d as in \u201cMy country, \u2019tis of thee, [\u2026] of thee I sing.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>A perfectly reasonable line in the context of the song. But I\u2019m a little embarrassed to have misheard it for 30+ years.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondegreens-mishearings"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17563"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17565,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17563\/revisions\/17565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}