Mondegreen is a word used to mean famously misheard lyrics and, more generally, any misheard phrase from a famous work. They are usually particular phrases in songs that are misheard to say something completely different and so to mean something completely different. They can be quite funny! Amazingly, so many mondegreens are collectively misheard. Others still are deliberately coined. For example, did anyone really think Elton John was singing ‘Hold me Closer, Tony Danza?’ Probably not, but it’s funny!
The word mondegreen was coined by Sylvia Wright. She took the word from a lyric she misheard in a song her mother used to sing to her as a child, The Bonny Earl of Murray from Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry:
Ye Higlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae you been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray
And Lady Mondegreen
Lady Mondegreen became quite real in her imagination but, to her dismay, Wright discovered later that she never existed. Instead, the lyrics were:
They hae slain the Earl of Murray,
And laid him on the green.
In 1954, Sylvia Wright wrote an article for Harper’s Magazine called “The Death of Lady Mondegreen’ and, as it turned out, she was not the only person who had misheard these lyrics!
The articles here concern songs that are the subject of mondegreens, some of them quite famously misheard.
Why does Peter Gabriel sing “she’s so popular” in the song Games Without Frontiers? He is singing about kids, so, one of the kids may be popular, but it does seem to come a bit out of left field. Well, it is a commonly misheard lyric, or mondegreen in Games Without Frontiers, which appeared on the album … Read more
Most people know the song Blinded by the Light from Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (usually known as Manfred Man), but it was actually a Bruce Springsteen Song, and an important one at that. It was really about driving around in your car; Bruce himself was the “teenage diplomat” in the song. But beyond that, there is … Read more