Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A mondegreen (/ ˈ m ɒ n d ɪ ˌ ɡ r iː n / ⓘ) is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. [1] Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.
The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term "mondegreen" in an essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen", which was published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954. [7]In the essay, Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the final two lines of the above verse as "they have slain the Earl o' Moray, and Lady Mondegreen."
The surname is based on Lady Mondegreen, a character of myth and legend. Jon Carroll, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, periodically runs a story which gives the truth about "Mondegreen". A mondegreen is a mishearing of the lyrics of popular songs. The name itself comes from Carroll's mishearing of a line in a song from his youth ...
A common mondegreen in the song is the perception that, following the title line, Lynne shouts "Bruce!" In the liner notes of the ELO compilation Flashback and elsewhere, Lynne has explained that he is singing a made-up word, "Groos", which some have suggested sounds like the German expression "Gruß", meaning "greeting."
The band thought this mondegreen was funny and used "Mayonaise" as a temporary song title when recording Siamese Dream and it eventually stuck. [ 9 ] While appearing on Q101's Brian and Kenzie Show on 4 July 2023, Billy Corgan specified that the mondegreen cited above was from a lyric on the song " Rhinoceros ".
A mondegreen is a misinterpretation of a word or phrase, often within the lyrics of a specific song or other type of performance, and need not make sense within that context. [22] An eggcorn must still retain something of the original meaning, [ 22 ] as the speaker understands it, and may be a replacement for a poorly understood phrase rather ...
Berlin's three-week-old son had died on Christmas day in 1928, so every year on December 25, he and his wife visited their baby's grave, Jody Rosin, author of White Christmas: The Story of an ...
This paragraph was added but it's not clear what it means by saying that the use of the word has changed - "mondegreen" was coined specifically to meant exactly "a kind of mishearing" of (poem) lyrics that "resegmented" a word a phrase into an entirely different combinations of sounds. I've removed it but perhaps other disagree.