We probably have an old thread somewhere about mondegreens, but I'm too lazy to look it up, and so I'll start a new one for something I just read in a biography.
"As a very smal child Teedie had also experienced a peculiar and memorable fear of church. … Mittie [his mother] had found he was so afraid of the Madison Square Church that he refused to set foot inside if alone and so she pressed him to tell her why. He was terrified, she discovered, of something called the "zeal." It was crouched in the dark corners of the church ready to jump at him, he said. When she asked what a zeal might be, he said he was not sure, but thought it was probably a large animal like an alligator or a dragon. He had heard the minister read about it from the Bible.
Using a concordance, she read him those passages containing the word "zeal" until suddenly, very excited, he told her to stop. The line was from the Book of John, chapter 2, verse 17: "And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up."
This is from David McCullough's biography of Theodore Roosevelt.
Originally posted by wordnerd: Book of John, chapter 2, verse 17: "And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up."
