Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Write it on Wednesday: Mondegreens

There's a name for misheard song lyrics - they are mondegreens.
There's a lovely story behind this name:
The word mondegreen, meaning a mishearing of a popular phrase or song lyric , was coined by the writer Sylvia Wright.
As a child she had heard the Scottish ballad " The Bonny Earl ofMurray" and had believed that one stanza went like this:

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands
Oh where hae you been?
They hae slay the Earl of Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
Poor Lady Mondegreen, thought Sylvia Wright . A tragic heroine dying with her liege; how poetic. When it turned out, some years later, that what they had actually done was ‘ slay the Earl of Murray and lay him on the green’ , Wright was so distraught by the sudden disappearance of her heroine that she memorialized her with a neologism.
An Aussie friend's son’s class at school used to sing the first line of the Australian national anthem as:
Australia’s sunset ostriches.
(Australia’s sons let us rejoice – now amended to ‘Australians all let us rejoice’)

I remember a few from prayers and hymns at school as well...
More recently, I thought for some time that the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "The Zephyr Song" had the lyrics - "Fly away on my cellphone..." I thought it was somewhat fanciful to describe a mobile phone call in such terms!

Have you a mondegreen to share? (Can you find one on the Web?) Is there a mondegreen that could inspire a LO for you? Could you use it as the title?

More Write it on Wednesday

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