Friday, July 07, 2006

Word of the Day: "Mondegreen"

While looking up the expression "safe as houses", I came across this interesting word:

Mondegreen - (noun) "a word or phrase resulting from a misinterpretation of a word or phrase that has been heard"

Here's the origin according to Random House's "The Mavens' Word of the Day" feature:

This word was coined by the author Silvia Wright in an article in Harper's in 1954. The poem in question was an old Scottish ballad called "The Bonnie Earl of Murray," which contains the couplet, "They hae slain the Earl o' Murray/And laid him on the green."

Ms Wright heard this as a child as "They hae slain the Earl o' Murray/And Lady Mondegreen," and went through life in sorrow for poor Lady Mondegreen until she encountered the ballad in written form and realized her error.


This phenomenon is relatively common, and it's useful to have a name to apply to it. A classic example is "Gladly the cross-eyed bear," for the hymn actually going "Gladly the cross I'd bear." Fans of the genre are referred to Gavin Edwards's book Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy, the title a mondegreen from the line in Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" that actually goes "Scuse me while I kiss the sky." The book, to which there have been several sequels, contains several hundred examples of song-based mondegreens, of which perhaps the best is "The girl with colitis goes by," from "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes," the real line in the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."


One of my other favorite mondegreens is "Bingo Jed Had a Light On" -- a mangled rendering of Steve Miller Band's "Big Old Jet Airliner". What is your favorite (or memorable) mondegreen?

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