From the Grauniad:
"Mr Rove found Mr Bush as a gland-handing good ol' boy trading on his family name and his charm."
At last! A real scandal.
I would venture that "mice" in this lyric is a canonical Mondegreen.
David Dyer-Bennet writes: "The explanation I remember is that 'mice' included rats as well in that period."
Do you have a reference for that? Or a century?
The OED distinguishes between "mouse" ("an animal of any of the smaller species of the genus Mus of rodents ... as a type of something small or insignificant") and "rat" ("a rodent of some of the larger species of the genus Rattus ... used as an opprobrious or familiar epithet").
Vermin tend to be listed as "rats and mice," as domestic creatures are "cats and dogs."
Mice tend to be seen as "wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous" little nuisances; rats as something burlier and menacing.
Now, "deer" could mean simply "beast." The word could include both rats and mice, and did proverbially. The 15th-century jingle, "Ratons & myse and soche smale dere" was remembered by Shakespeare, remembering poor Tom: "But Mice, and Rats, and such small Deare, Haue bin Toms food, for seuen long yeare."
Upstream, Tracie Brown has quoted a verse from the carol "Christ Made a Trance":
Oh Hell is deep and Hell is dark
And Hell is full of moss
A version I know has:
Oh Hell is deep and Hell is dark
And Hell is full of mist
Darkly evocative: but it's a poetry of metamorphosis, I think, a sort of cat's cradle between the singer and the listening ear.
There's a neat discussion of that carol in a review of Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song from the Blues to the Baltic by Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter:
"If we look at Christ Made a Trance as a performance, rather than a piece of literature, even the most 'disrupted' form makes perfect sense in the context of its use. The point of such carols in performance is not to set theology to music but to get listeners to part with cash. Especially if sung at Christmas, a Travellers' text...contains a good enough selection of key words and phrases to be recognisably a carol and earn a penny."
Greer
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