Mondegreen

A mondegreen (ˈmɒndᵻˌgriːn) 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 hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense. The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, recalling a childhood memory of her mother reading the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" (from Thomas Percy's 1765 book Reliques of Ancient English Poetry), and mishearing the words "layd him on the green" 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. In a 1954 essay in Harper's Magazine, Sylvia 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: The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original. People are more likely to notice what they expect rather than things that are 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 may 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.