This has nothing to do with anything other than one of my favorite words: mondegreen.
You all know about mondegreens, even if you’ve never heard the word before. A mondegreen is a mishearing of a phrase or song lyric. You know: “What a Friend We Have in Cheeses” or “‘Scuse me, while I kiss this guy!”
It’s sort of the counterpart, or maybe the cousin, to the malapropism (another wonderful word for a wonderful phenomenon; just yesterday I heard that so-and-so was “a pigment of your imagination”).*
The word was apparently coined by Sylvia Wright in a 1954 article in The Atlantic. Her error was in one verse of the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray,” which she understood as:
Ye highlands and ye lowlands
Oh where hae you been?
They hae slay the Earl of Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
It apparently took decades for her to learn that no noblewomen had come to harm; after killing the unfortunate Earl, “they” had simply laid him on the green.
I am a right Mistress of the Mondegreen, which causes the Dude no end of delight. I just discovered another one (mild this time) during this past Christmas season, when I realized that the lyric was “Mele Kalikimaka is Hawaii’s way,” not “a wise way,” to say Merry Christmas. Durrrrr.
Though I am a serious offender, I rarely remember my own errors, even though they often resulted in laughter-to-the-point-of-tears. My favorite is one of the Dude’s: as a boy, he was utterly convinced that The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” had more to do with marsupials than transcendental meditation:
Kan-ga-roo-oo Daaaa-vid!
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Kan-ga-roo-oo Daaaa-vid! Kan-ga-roo-oo Daaaa-vid! (etc.)
Few things get me laughing harder, in less time, than a good mondegreen. If I need cheering up, I just click over to SF Gate columnist Jon Carroll’s archive of mondegreen-based pieces. Truly. So, today’s FFT is about your favorite mondegreens–those you’re responsible for or those you’ve simply heard of. C’mon, let’s see who can get me to snort with laughter first.
*And don’t forget spoonerisms!
@ Richard lol I always thought the second part to that was, “as we dream, light the fire” And when I was in my teens I was confused a bit by the ‘erotic’ line.
@The Goldfish – I’m pretty sure heaven is a place on Earth.
When I was 10 years old I didn’t realize the singer of “Fast Car” was a woman – Tracy Chapman – so while I didn’t have a mondegreen for the line, I never understood exactly what “he” did in the market…
“And I work in the market as a checkout garble-what-now?”
The very moment I discovered the singer was female I knew she was a checkout girl.
In Opeth’s song The Drapery Falls I heard ‘deadly patterns’ as ‘deadly badgers.’ Well, I didn’t really think it said that, but that’s what it sounded like.
Deicide’s song Dead By Dawn… the line in the chorus sounds like “Take My Car.”
Also my brother’s friend swears he heard the words ‘disco inferno’ in a Vital Remains song.
Some girlfriends decided that the line from Madonna’s Ray of Light was “And I feel like a disco gnome”. I think it makes more sense than the original.
[...] posted about mondegreens, when people confuse the lyrics of a song. But sometimes listeners confuse the whole damn song. [...]