A Catalogue of Useless Facts

Mondegreens

Mondegreens
- linguistics -

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A "mondegreen" is a linguistic phenomenon mainly associated with songs or spoken poetry. Coined by American author Sylvia Wright, the effect relies on a listener mishearing a line of a poem or a song lyric -- often due to garbling or other poor sound quality -- and then replacing the words with a reasonable alternative.

Wright credits a Scottish ballad for the term, the first stanza of which ends with:

"They hae slain the Earl o' Moray,
And laid him on the green."

As a child, though, Wright misunderstood the lines to read:

"They hae slain the Earl o' Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen."

Perhaps a more famous example is the Iron Butterfly song "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", whose title is a mondegreen for the originally intended title, "In The Garden of Eden".

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Sources ▼

https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/science-misheard-lyrics-mondeg...