Today's word: mondegreen

Singer Jose Feliciano had a hit in the 1970s with a cheerful song called Feliz Navidad, Spanish for Merry Christmas. My wife, who will never let me near her again when she reads this, misheard the phrase and thought he was singing "Bobby's mummy died". 

She had fallen victim to a mondegreen - the mishearing of a lyric in a way that gives it a new, often hilarious, meaning. We've all done it of course. Or so I'm told.

"Mondegreen" was coined by American Sylvia Wright after she misheard a line from the 17th-century ballad "The Bonny Earl Moray". What she heard was:

"They hae slain the Earl O'Moray
And Lady Mondegreen."

The actual lyric, however, was:

"They hae slain the Earl O'Moray
And laid him on the green."

Song lyrics seem to be the most popular source of mondegreens, perhaps because singers tend to worry less about careful pronunciation, which is putting it kindly. Famous examples include "scuse me while I kiss this guy" (real lyric: "scuse me while I kiss the sky" - Jimi Hendrix), and "there is a bathroom on the right" instead of "there is a bad moon on the rise", from Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising". Eventually both Hendrix and CCR began singing the mondegreen versions of these lyrics in concert. 

In the 1980s, Maxell tapes produced a couple of classic ads based on the mondegreen phenomenon - check them out here and here.

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