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Mondegreen - Misheard lyrics

The term for misheard lyrics is "mondegreen." It that describes the phenomenon where you hear something wrong but it makes a kind of loopy sense anyway. While most common in songs it can also refer to misheard phrases in poems etc.

Famous examples include "the ants are my friends," for Bob Dylan's "the answer my friends, is blowing in the wind..." and "'scuse me while I kiss this guy" for Jimi Hendrix's "'scuse me while I kiss the sky."

The term "mondegreen" was coined by Sylvia Wright, a newspaper columnist in the '50s who wrongly heard the lyrics of a Scottish folk song, "The Bonny Earl of Morray," and wrote about it. As a child she had heard this Scottish ballad and had believed that one stanza went like this:

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands
Oh where hae you been?
They hae slay the Earl of Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

Poor Lady Mondegreen, thought Sylvia Wright. A tragic heroine dying with her liege; how poetic. When it turned out, some years later, that what they had actually done was slay the Earl of Murray and lay him on the green, Wright was so distraught by the sudden disappearance of her heroine that she memorialized her with a neologism. 

More popular Mondegreens tomorrow.

Soul Food June 11

Today in History June 11