WHAT IN THE WORLD IS A MONDEGREEN? BY CHERYL PIERSON

I know you are wondering. Mondegreen is a word that means the mishearing of a popular phrase or song lyric. (BOY, have I been there many times!)

I found this information and a wonderful list of Mondegreens on Dr. Michael Barber’s link on the web. Here’s what he has to say about the origin of the word Mondegreen.

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 of Murray” 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.

I have never heard of a Mondegreen before just about three days ago, and then, in the space of those three days, I saw it used twice in internet postings. I had to find out exactly what it was.

We’ve all done this, haven’t we? We want to sing along but we aren’t sure of the lyrics so we just…sing what it sounds like, even though it might not make the best sense. Later, we find out what we were singing was, well, not right, and didn’t make the best sense, as we’d always thought!

I’ll go first. When I was about 8, the James Bond movie Thunderball came out. The theme song was by Tom Jones. Here’s the verse I always sang wrong:

He knows the meaning of success, his needs are more so he gives less, they call him the winner who takes all, and he strikes like Thunderball.



Well, in my defense, I was 8 years old and what I actually sang made sense to ME: Instead of “they call him the winner who takes all” I sang, “the cold in the winter who takes all”—see? Perfect sense! Summer days were gone.

When Garth Brooks’ song Shameless came out, my sister and I happened to be talking on the phone one day about music and she said, “There is one song I don’t get. That song by Garth Brooks… “SHAVING”—why is he singing about shaving?” I thought she was putting me on, but no. She really thought he was singing SHAVING instead of SHAMELESS.



My mom told me one time that when she was young, she and her sisters would go buy a Hit Parade magazine and gather round the radio listening to the “hits”, hoping they were in their magazine. They’d find it quickly in the magazine and try to memorize the lyrics along with the music. But there was one song that had some Spanish words in it and they just had to try to mimic the sounds, because none of them had a clue about Spanish, and I’m guessing that even if that song was included in the magazine, there would have been very little chance they’d have figured out the pronunciation on their own. I said, “Weren’t you embarrassed to be singing the wrong words?” She said, “No, because no one else could do any better.” HA! I have laughed and laughed about that through the years. The problem with a Mondegreen in another language is there are so many possibilities of what you might accidentally be singing about.

Here is a fun partial list of some Mondegreens you might recognize. For the full list, go to Dr. Barber’s page here: https://uh.edu/~mbarber/mondegreens.html

The artist is Elton John (Rocket Man), the Mondegreen is: Rocket man, burning all the trees off every lawn. The actual words are: Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone.

The artist is Don Henley (Boys of Summer). The Mondegreen is: after the poison summer has gone. The actual words are: after the boys of summer have gone.

How about Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”? Mondegreen is: when the rainbow shaves you clean you’ll know. Actual words are: when the rain washes you clean you’ll know.

And here’s a good one too, from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising. The Mondegreen is a choice this time, with: There’s a bathroom on the right, OR There’s a baboon on the rise. Of course, it’s actually There’s a bad moon on the rise.



What about you? Do you have a Mondegreen to share with us today? I really do love these!