A mondegreen () is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. "A misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing, esp. of the lyrics to a song". Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense. The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, recalling a childhood memory of her mother reading the Scottish ballad "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray", and mishearing the words "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen".
"Mondegreen" was included in the 2000 edition of the Random House Webster's College Dictionary, and in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary added the word in 2008.CNN.com: Dictionary adds new batch of words. 7 July 2008.
Etymology In a 1954 essay in Harper's Magazine, Sylvia Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the last line of the first stanza from the ballad "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray" (from Thomas Percy's 1765 book Reliques of Ancient English Poetry). She wrote:
The correct lines are, "They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / And laid him on the green." Wright explained the need for a new term:
Psychology People are more likely to notice what they expect rather than things that are not part of their everyday experiences; this is known as confirmation bias. A person may mistake an unfamiliar stimulus for a familiar and more plausible version. For example, to consider a well-known mondegreen in the song "Purple Haze", one may be more likely to hear Jimi Hendrix singing that he is about to kiss this guy than that he is about to kiss the sky. Similarly, if a lyric uses words or phrases that the listener is unfamiliar with, or in an uncommon sentence structure, they may be misheard as using more familiar terms.
The creation of mondegreens may be driven in part by cognitive dissonance; the listener finds it psychologically uncomfortable to listen to a song and not make out the words. Steven Connor suggests that mondegreens are the result of the brain's constant attempts to make sense of the world by making assumptions to fill in the gaps when it cannot clearly determine what it is hearing. Connor sees mondegreens as the "wrenchings of nonsense into sense". This dissonance will be most acute when the lyrics are in a language in which the listener is fluent."it turns out that listeners to popular music seem to grope in a fog of blunder, botch, and misprision, making flailing guesses at sense in the face of what seems to be a world of largely unintelligible utterance"
Steven Pinker has observed that mondegreen mishearings tend to be plausible than the original lyrics, and that once a listener has "locked in" to a particular misheard interpretation of a song's lyrics, it can remain unquestioned, even when that plausibility becomes strained . Pinker gives the example of a student "stubbornly" mishearing the chorus to "Venus" ("I'm your Venus") as "I'm your penis" and being surprised that the song was allowed on the radio. The phenomenon may, in some cases, be triggered by people hearing "what they want to hear", as in the case of the song "Louie Louie": parents heard obscenities in the Kingsmen recording where none existed.
James Gleick states that the mondegreen is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Without the improved communication and language standardization brought about by radio, he argues that there would have been no way to recognize and discuss this shared experience. Just as mondegreens transform songs based on experience, a folk song learned by repetition often is transformed over time when sung by people in a region where some of the song's references have become obscure. A classic example is "The Golden Vanity", which contains the line "As she sailed upon the lowland sea". British immigrants carried the song to Appalachia, where later generations of singers, not knowing what the term lowland sea refers to, transformed it over generations from "lowland" to "lonesome".
Examples In songs
The national anthem of the United States is highly susceptible to the creation of mondegreens, two in the first line. Francis Scott Key's "The Star-Spangled Banner" begins with the line "O say can you see, by the dawn's early light".Francis Scott Key, (lyrics), 1814, MENC: The National Association for Music Education National Anthem Project (archived from 26 January 2013, at the Wayback Machine. on 26 January 2013). This has been misinterpreted (both accidentally and deliberately) as "José, can you see", an example of the Hobson-Jobson effect. The second half of the line has also been misheard as "by the donzerly light" or other variants. This has led to people believing that "donzerly" is an actual word.
Religious songs, learned by ear (and often by children), are another common source of mondegreens. The most-cited example is "Gladly, the cross-eyed bear" Drawings by Bernarda Bryson. Reprinted in: Contains the essays "The Death of Lady Mondegreen" and "The Quest of Lady Mondegreen". (from the line in the hymn "Keep Thou My Way" by Fanny Crosby and Theodore E. Perkins: "Kept by Thy tender care, gladly the cross I'll bear"). Jon Carroll and many others quote it as "Gladly the cross bear"; the confusion may be heightened by the unusual object-subject-verb word order of the phrase. The song "I Was on a Boat That Day" by Old Dominion features a reference to this mondegreen.
Mondegreens expanded as a phenomenon with the advent of radio, and especially with the growth of rock and roll and hip-hop. Among the most-reported examples are:
Scuse me while I kiss this guy" (from a lyric in the song "Purple Haze" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Scuse me while I kiss the sky"). "The girl with colitis goes by" (from a lyric in the song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" by The Beatles: "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes") "There's a bathroom on the right" (from a lyric in the song "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival: "There's a bad moon on the rise"). "All the lonely Starbucks lovers" (from a lyric in the song "Blank Space" by Taylor Swift: "Got a long list of ex-lovers")
Both Jimi Hendrix and Creedence Clearwater Revival's John Fogerty eventually acknowledged the mishearings of their lyrics by deliberately singing the mondegreen versions of their songs in concert.
The cover of Bruce Springsteen's song "Blinded by the Light" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band contains what has been called "probably the most misheard lyric of all time"., Blogcritics Music The phrase "revved up like a deuce", altered from Springsteen's original "cut loose like a deuce", both lyrics referring to the hot rodders slang deuce (short for deuce coupe) for a 1932 Ford coupe, is frequently misheard as "wrapped up like a douche".The comedy show The Vacant Lot built an entire skit, called "Blinded by the Light" around four friends arguing about the lyrics. One version can be seen here: Springsteen himself has joked about the phenomenon, claiming that it was not until Manfred Mann rewrote the song to be about a "feminine hygiene product" that the song became popular.
Another commonly cited example of a song susceptible to mondegreens is Nirvana's 1991 song "Smells Like Teen Spirit". For instance, the line "Here we are now, entertain us" has variously been misinterpreted as "Here we are now, in containers" and "Here we are now, hot potatoes", among other renditions. American comedy musician "Weird Al" Yankovic wrote a 1992 parody of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" called "Smells Like Nirvana", whose lyrics poke fun at the difficult-to-understand lyrics to the original song. The opening verse begins "What is this song/All about?/Can't figure any lyrics out", and at one point Yankovic purposely garbles the lyrics: "It's hard to bargle nawdle zouss/With all these marbles in my mouth". "Smells Like Teen Spirits writer Kurt Cobain called Yankovic "America's modern pop-rock genious" in personal journals published after his 1994 suicide. American rock band Electric Six revealed that their song Gay Bar was based on a humorous mishearing of the lyrics for the song "Girl U Want' by Devo, in which the lyrics: "She's just the girl, she's just the girl, the girl you want" were mishead as "she's just a girl, it's just a girl at a gay bar".
Rap and hip-hop lyrics may be particularly susceptible to being misheard because they do not necessarily follow standard pronunciations. The delivery of rap lyrics often relies heavily upon regional pronunciations or non-traditional accenting of words and phonemes to adhere to the artist's stylizations and the lyrics' written structure. This often occurs in the context of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), as rap as a genre and musical form is associated with the African-American community. This can create confusion in audiences not familiar with AAVE. The issue is exemplified by controversies over alleged transcription errors in Yale University Press' 2010 Anthology of Rap.
Standardized and recorded mondegreens Sometimes, the modified version of a lyric becomes standard, as is the case with "The Twelve Days of Christmas". The original has "four colly birds" (colly means 'black'; compare A Midsummer Night's Dream: "Brief as the lightning in the collied night"); by the turn of the twentieth century, these had been replaced by birds, which is the lyric used in the now-standard 1909 Frederic Austin version. Another example is found in ELO's song "Don't Bring Me Down". The original recorded lyric was "don't bring me down, Gruss!", but fans misheard it as "don't bring me down, Bruce!". Eventually, ELO began playing the song with the mondegreen lyric.
The song "Sea Lion Woman", recorded in 1939 by Christine and Katherine Shipp, was performed by Nina Simone under the title "See Line Woman". According to the liner notes from the compilation A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings, the correct title of this playground song might also be "See [the] Lyin' Woman" or "C-Line Woman". Jack Lawrence's misinterpretation of the French phrase "pauvre Jean" ("poor John") as the identically pronounced "pauvres gens" ("poor people") led to the translation of La Goualante du pauvre Jean ("The Ballad of Poor John") as "The Poor People of Paris", a hit song in 1956.
In literature
A Monk Swimming by author Malachy McCourt is so titled because of a childhood mishearing of a phrase from the Catholic rosary prayer, Hail Mary. "Amongst women" became "a monk swimmin.
The title and plot of the short science fiction story "Come You Nigh: Kay Shuns" ("Com-mu-ni-ca-tions") by Lawrence A. Perkins, in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine (April 1970), deals with securing interplanetary radio communications by encoding them with mondegreens.
Olive, the Other Reindeer is a 1997 children's book by Vivian Walsh, which borrows its title from a mondegreen of the line "all of the other reindeer" in the song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". The book was adapted into an animated Christmas special in 1999.
The travel guidebook series Lonely Planet is named after the misheard phrase "lovely planet" sung by Joe Cocker in Matthew Moore's song "Space Captain".
In film
A monologue of mondegreens appears in the 1971 film Carnal Knowledge. The camera focuses on actress Candice Bergen laughing as she recounts various phrases that fooled her as a child, including "Round John Virgin" (instead of "'Round yon virgin...") and "Gladly, the cross-eyed bear" (instead of "Gladly the cross I'd bear"). The title of the 2013 film Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a misheard lyric from a folk song; director David Lowery decided to use it because it evoked the "classical, regional" feel of 1970s rural Texas. (in the article text, not the video)