Mondegreen


A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense. American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, writing that as a girl, when her mother read to her from Percy's Reliques, she had misheard the lyric "layd him on the green" in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" 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.

Etymology

In a 1954 essay in Harper's Magazine, Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the last line of the first stanza from the seventeenth-century ballad The Bonnie Earl O' Moray. She wrote:
The correct fourth line is, "And laid him on the green". Wright explained the need for a new term:

Psychology

People are more likely to notice what they expect than things not part of their everyday experiences; this is known as confirmation bias. Similarly, one 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 would 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, they may be misheard as using more familiar terms.
The creation of mondegreens may be driven in part by cognitive dissonance, as 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 the listener is fluent in.
On the other hand, Steven Pinker has observed that mondegreen mishearings tend to be less 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" 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 claims that the mondegreen is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Without the improved communication and language standardization brought about by radio, he believes 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 singers, not knowing what the term lowland sea refers to, transformed it over generations from "lowland" to "lonesome".

Notable examples

Notable collections

The classicist and Linguist Steve Reece has collected examples of English mondegreens in song lyrics, religious creeds and liturgies, commercials and advertisements, and jokes and riddles. He has used this collection to shed light on the process of "junctural metanalysis" during the oral transmission of the ancient Greek epics, the Iliad and Odyssey.

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 "Star-Spangled Banner" begins with the line "O say can you see, by the dawn's early light." This has been accidentally and deliberately misinterpreted as "Jose, can you see," another example of the Hobson-Jobson effect, countless times. The second half of the line has been misheard as well, as "by the donzerly light," or other variants. This has led to many people believing that "donzerly" is an actual word.
Religious songs, learned by ear, are another common source of mondegreens. The most-cited example is "Gladly, the cross-eyed bear". Jon Carroll and many others quote it as "Gladly the cross I'd bear"
Mondegreens expanded as a phenomenon with radio, and, especially, the growth of rock and roll. Amongst the most-reported examples are:
  1. "There's a bathroom on the right".
  2. "Scuse me while I kiss this guy".
Both Creedence's John Fogerty and Hendrix eventually acknowledged these mishearings by deliberately singing the "mondegreen" versions of their songs in concert.
"Blinded by the Light", a cover of a Bruce Springsteen song by Manfred Mann's Earth Band, contains what has been called "probably the most misheard lyric of all time". 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 for a 1932 Ford coupé, is frequently misheard as "wrapped up like a douche". 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 "Smells Like Teen Spirit", with the line "here we are now, entertain us" variously being misinterpreted as "here we are now, in containers", and "here we are now, hot potatoes", amongst other renditions.
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 relies heavily upon an often regional pronunciation or non-traditional accenting of words and their phonemes to adhere to the artist's stylizations and the lyrics' written structure. This issue is exemplified in controversies over alleged transcription errors in Yale University Press's 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" ; sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, these became calling birds, which is the lyric used in the 1909 Frederic Austin version.
A number of misheard lyrics have been recorded, turning a mondegreen into a real title. 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 Lyin' Woman" or "C-Line Woman". Jack Lawrence's misinterpretation of the French phrase "pauvre Jean" as the identically pronounced "pauvres gens" led to the translation of La Goualante du pauvre Jean 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" by Lawrence A. Perkins, in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine, 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 guide book series Lonely Planet is named after the misheard phrase "lovely planet" sung by Joe Cocker in Matthew Moore's song "Space Captain".
The title of the novel The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger derives from from the poem 'Comin' Thro' the Rye" by Robert Burns. The book's protagonist pictures children playing in a field of rye near the edge of a cliff, and catching them when they fall off.

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" and "Gladly, the cross-eyed 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 television

Mondegreens have been used in many television advertising campaigns, including:
The traditional game Chinese whispers involves mishearing a whispered sentence to produce successive mondegreens that gradually distort the original sentence as it is repeated by successive listeners.
Among schoolchildren in the U.S., daily rote recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance has long provided opportunities for the genesis of mondegreens.

Non-English languages

Dutch

In Dutch, mondegreens are popularly referred to as Mama appelsap, from the Michael Jackson song Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' which features the lyrics Mama-se mama-sa ma-ma-coo-sa, and was once misheard as Mama say mama sa mamappelsap. The Dutch radio station 3FM had a show Superrradio run by Timur Perlin and Ramon with an item in which listeners were encouraged to send in mondegreens under the name "Mama appelsap". The segment was popular for years.

French

In French, the phenomenon is also known as 'hallucination auditive', especially when referring to pop songs.
The title of the film La Vie en rose depicting the life of Édith Piaf can be mistaken for "L'Avion rose".
The title of the 1983 French novel Le Thé au harem d'Archi Ahmed by Mehdi Charef is based on the main character mishearing le théorème d'Archimède in his mathematics class.
A classic example in French is similar to the "Lady Mondegreen" anecdote: in his 1962 collection of children's quotes La Foire aux cancres, the humorist Jean-Charles refers to a misunderstood lyric of "La Marseillaise" : "Entendez-vous... mugir ces féroces soldats" is heard as "...Séféro, ce soldat".

German

Mondegreens are a well-known phenomenon in German, especially where non-German songs are concerned. They are sometimes called, after a well-known example, Agathe Bauer-songs. Journalist Axel Hacke published a series of books about them, beginning with Der weiße Neger Wumbaba.
In urban legend, children's paintings of nativity scenes, occasionally include next to the Child, Mary, Joseph and so on, an additional, laughing creature known as the Owi. The reason is to be found in the line Gottes Sohn! O wie lacht / Lieb' aus Deinem göttlichen Mund from Silent Night. The subject is "Lieb", a poetic contraction of "die Liebe" leaving off the final -e and the definite article, so that the phrase might be misunderstood as being about a person named Owi laughing "in a loveable manner". Owi lacht is the title of at least one book about Christmas and Christmas songs.

Hebrew

Ghil'ad Zuckermann cites the Hebrew example mukhrakhím liyót saméakh instead of the high-register úru 'akhím belév saméakh, from the well-known song "Háva Nagíla".
An Israeli site dedicated to Hebrew mondegreens has coined the term "avatiach" for "mondegreen", named for a common mishearing of Shlomo Artzi's award-winning 1970 song "Ahavtia".

Polish

A paper in phonology cites memoirs of the poet Antoni Słonimski, who confessed that in the recited poem Konrad Wallenrod he used to hear "zwierz Alpuhary" rather than "z wież Alpuhary".

Portuguese

The most well-known mondegreen in Brazil is in the song "Noite do Prazer" by Claudio Zoli: the line "Na madrugada a vitrola rolando um blues, tocando B. B. King sem parar", is often misheard as "Na madrugada a vitrola rolando um blues, trocando de biquini sem parar".

Russian

In 1875 Fyodor Dostoyevsky cited a line from Fyodor Glinka's song "Troika" "колокольчик, дар Валдая", stating that it is usually understood as "колокольчик, дарвалдая".

Reverse mondegreen

A reverse mondegreen is the intentional production, in speech or writing, of words or phrases that seem to be gibberish but disguise meaning. A prominent example is Mairzy Doats, a 1943 novelty song by Milton Drake, Al Hoffman, and Jerry Livingston. The lyrics are a reverse mondegreen, made up of oronyms, so pronounced as to challenge the listener to interpret them:
The clue to the meaning is contained in the bridge:
This makes it clear that the last line is "A kid'll eat ivy, too; wouldn't you?"
Other examples include:
Two authors have written books of supposed foreign-language poetry that are actually mondegreens of nursery rhymes in English. Luis van Rooten's pseudo-French includes critical, historical, and interpretive apparatus, as does John Hulme's Mörder Guss Reims, attributed to a fictitious German poet. Both titles sound like the phrase "Mother Goose Rhymes". Both works can also be considered soramimi, which produces different meanings when interpreted in another language. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced a similar effect in his canon "Difficile Lectu", which, though ostensibly in Latin, is actually an opportunity for scatological humor in both German and Italian.
Some performers and writers have used deliberate mondegreens to create double entendres. The phrase "if you see Kay" has been employed many times, notably as a line from James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses and in many songs, including by blues pianist Memphis Slim in 1963, R. Stevie Moore in 1977, April Wine on its 1982 album Power Play, the Poster Children via their Daisy Chain Reaction in 1991, Turbonegro in 2005, Aerosmith in "Devil's Got a New Disguise" in 2006, and The Script in their 2008 song "If You See Kay". Britney Spears did the same thing with the song "If U Seek Amy". A similar effect was created in Hindi in the 2011 Bollywood movie Delhi Belly in the song "Bhaag D.K. Bose". While "D. K. Bose" appears to be a person's name, it is sung repeatedly in the chorus to form the deliberate mondegreen "bhosadi ke", a Hindi expletive.
"Mondegreen" is a song by Yeasayer on their 2010 album, Odd Blood. The lyrics are intentionally obscure and spoken hastily to encourage the mondegreen effect.

Related linguistic phenomena

Closely related categories are Hobson-Jobson, where a word from a foreign language is homophonically translated into one's own language, e.g. cockroach from Spanish cucaracha, and soramimi, a Japanese term for homophonic translation of song lyrics.
An unintentionally incorrect use of similar-sounding words or phrases, resulting in a changed meaning, is a malapropism. If there is a connection in meaning, it may be called an eggcorn. If a person stubbornly continues to mispronounce a word or phrase after being corrected, that person has committed a mumpsimus.