August 11, 1999

mondegreen

I'm trying to locate the term for the situation where a phrase is misheard as a different phrase. I believe it is something like a "merein" and is associated with a 19th century English poem about somebody killing Sir or Lord Edward perhaps and laying him in the lake except the laying him in the lake was misheard as Lady Merinlake so the phrase was so and so kill Lord Edward and Lady Mereinlake but I know I got it pretty wrong. I'm looking for both the poem, the term, and some other examples of this type of confusion.

Well! You get the basics pretty right, but the story is a little different.

The word you are looking for is mondegreen, 'a word or phrase resulting from a misinterpretation of a word or phrase that has been heard'.

This word was coined by the author Silvia Wright in an article in Harper's in 1954. The poem in question was an old Scottish ballad called "The Bonnie Earl of Murray," which contains the couplet, "They hae slain the Earl o' Murray/And laid him on the green."

Ms Wright heard this as a child as "They hae slain the Earl o' Murray/And Lady Mondegreen," and went through life in sorrow for poor Lady Mondegreen until she encountered the ballad in written form and realized her error.

This phenomenon is relatively common, and it's useful to have a name to apply to it. A classic example is "Gladly the cross-eyed bear," for the hymn actually going "Gladly the cross I'd bear."

Fans of the genre are referred to Gavin Edwards's book Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy, the title a mondegreen from the line in Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" that actually goes "Scuse me while I kiss the sky." The book, to which there have been several sequels, contains several hundred examples of song-based mondegreens, of which perhaps the best is "The girl with colitis goes by," from "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes," the real line in the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."