We’ve all done it—you hear a song that might not be enunciated in the King’s English, and before you know it, Jimmy Hendrix is singing “excuse me while I kiss this guy.” This odd phenomenon of auditory processing has a quirky name: a mondegreen. Surely, it’s named for Professor Charles Mondegreen who first discovered the scientific basis for such misunderstandings. No? Then it must be a strange Esperanto mash-up that translates to “green world.” Wrong again. It turns out that the term mondegreen itself is a mondegreen. You heard that right. It originates from a misheard bit of a ballad. As a child, American writer Sylvia Wright enjoyed hearing her mother read from Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. One of her favorites was a Scottish ballad concerning the death of an Earl: “They hae slain the Earl Amurray, and laid him on the green.” To Wright’s imaginative young ears, the line “laid him on the green” became “Lady Mondegreen,” and the Earl’s accidental companion in death became the official mascot of misunderstood lyrics.
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