#907883 added March 29, 2017 at 4:00pm Restrictions: None
Mondegreens
Mondegreens - linguistics -
A "mondegreen" is a linguistic phenomenon mainly associated with songs or spoken poetry. Coined by American author Sylvia Wright, the effect relies on a listener mishearing a line of a poem or a song lyric -- often due to garbling or other poor sound quality -- and then replacing the words with a reasonable alternative.
Wright credits a Scottish ballad for the term, the first stanza of which ends with:
"They hae slain the Earl o' Moray,
And laid him on the green."
As a child, though, Wright misunderstood the lines to read:
"They hae slain the Earl o' Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen."
Perhaps a more famous example is the Iron Butterfly song "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", whose title is a mondegreen for the originally intended title, "In The Garden of Eden".
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