**Mondegreen: Meaning a word or phrase that results from mis-hearing a proper word or phrase. **
*Background *
Humorist Sylvia Write confessed in a column during the 1950’s that wen she first heard the verses " They have slain the Earl of Moray / And laid him on the green." from the Scottish folk ballad " The bonnie Earl of Moray", she thought the lines described the double tragedy, " They have slain the Earl Amurray / And Lady Mondegreen."
Here’s a few others (All from the magazine) :
" Lead us not into Penn Station."
“Years ago, someone alluded to music by *the loneliest monk” misreferring to musician " Thelonious Monk."
That said, here is my first Mondegreen:
The christmas song *God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen *when I was a kid, I swear it sounded like *God rest ye Jerry Mendlebaum. *
Took me the longest time to figure out what bloose wade shoes were. (Had I heard the Elvis tune instead of the Bay City Rollers tune, I might have gotten it; damn Scottish accents.)
I heard about this interview, once, where the interviewer ended up doing a hatchet job on the interviewee. One badly placed criticism, though, was when the interviewer said the interviewee had some bizarre taste in obscure literature, including a work called “Lame is Rob.”
There used to be a song that was played ad nauseum on the local AM station when I was a kid called “Convoy” by C.W. McCall. I never paid much attention to it, but always thought it was a commercial for Lawn-Boy lawnmowers.
My brother says he knew a kid who thought the line “And as we wind on down the road” from Stairway to Heaven was actually “And there’s a wino down the road.”
He also sings the signature line from Bad Moon Rising as “There’s a bathroom on the right.” Ruined the song for me.
Not exactly a Mondegreen, but I like this: Recently we were returning from a weekend family getaway. My wife and I were discussing the characters from the Land of Make-Believe in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and I mentioned X the Owl. From the backseat, where it’s tougher to hear, my daughter asked, “Who’s Tex Diablo?”
Now I want to open a chain of Barbecue Restaurants called “Tex Diablo’s.”
A line from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat:
“Oh now, brothers, how low can you stoop? You naked, sordid group.” Actually, it’s “you make a sordid group,” but my way makes more sense.
[little girl voice]
“Angels we have heard on high,
sweetly singing organ pains”[/little girl voice]
(I proudly sang it this way at my first Christmas program.)
I also used to mangle Bad, Bad Leroy Brown when I was a kid:
“He had a 44 gun in his pocket, poor bum
he had a razor hit his shoe”
In the Melissa Etheridge song, “I Wanna Come Over,” the line is, “To hell with the consequence.” I found this out while reading a mondegreen web page. I thought the line was, “to hell with the concert plans.”
We’re in the SCA. My daughter (age 11) made a wooden box based on a 13th century viking box and entered it into the arts & sciences competition. She told me afterwards that one judge, who I knew to be kind of picky, said, “This is very nice, but you should make candles.” I was pissed. Spent the rest of the day glaring at the guy, told my daughter’s woodworking instructor about it, and at the end of the day as we were driving home, I told my wife what the guy said. My daughter piped up, “He didn’t say make CANDLES, he said make HANDLES.”
and, oh gawd, I know that’s gonna be running through my head all day now.