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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I think the concensus among linguists is that mondegreens (misheard song lyrics) are not eggcorns.
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilk … reens.html
This was such a nice article, I reproduced it below…
Mondegreens: A Short Guide
By Gavin Edwards
My first misheard lyric came at the advanced age of six, when I learned to sing “Row, Row Your Boat.” I was convinced that the line after “merrily merrily merrily” was “life’s a butter dream,” rather than the more canonical “life is but a dream.” I wasn’t sure what visions of dairy products had to do with a boat trip, but I didn’t have the courage to ask anybody.
Eventually my mistake was discovered in an elementary-school chorus class, and I suffered the humiliation that can only be experienced in elementary-school chorus classes. But although the shame eventually subsided, the pattern would repeat itself for the rest of my life. Usually, it wasn’t even a question of mulling over the lyrics and then getting them wrong. I would dive straight into a state of ignorance, and only be rudely corrected if I read a lyric sheet or heard somebody else singing the accurate version of a song.
Misheard lyrics come with many alternate names, only some of which form compound nouns when joined with the word “boneheaded.” Some of the names that have been used: Music Ear Disturbance, disclexia, chronic lyricosis, and Litellas (after Gilda Radner’s befuddled Saturday Night Live character). The technical term prized by aficionados is mondegreen. If your dictionary doesn’t include “mondegreen,” throw it out and buy a better one.
The term “mondegreen” was coined by Sylvia Wright in a 1954 Atlantic article. As a child, young Sylvia had listened to a folk song that included the lines “They had slain the Earl of Moray/And Lady Mondegreen.” As is customary with misheard lyrics, she didn’t realize her mistake for years. The song was not about the tragic fate of Lady Mondegreen, but rather, the continuing plight of the good earl: “They had slain the Earl of Moray/And laid him on the green.”
Mondegreens can be found in every area of the spoken word, from the record-buyer who asks for a copy the Queen single “Bohemian Rap City” to the schoolchild who is convinced that the Pledge of Allegiance begins “I led the pigeons to the flag.” They tend to be about primal concerns: food, sex, animals. Any misheard lyric is an impromptu audio Rorshach test. It can be alarming to discover that significant parts of our brains want pop songs to cover the lyrical topics of cheese, walruses, and clowns. Songwriters take note: There is a large, untapped market for songs about food.
A good mondegreen lasts for years, and redefines how we hear the song. I had classmates who teased me about my butter dreams well into junior high school. Even when corrected, many people rightly decide that they prefer their version of the song to the one that’s actually considered “correct”—and who would deny that “She wore raspberries and grapes” has more poetry in it that the relatively mundane “She wore a raspberry beret”?
We’ve learned not to pay much attention to the lyrics or rock and pop songs, but rather to let them wash over us and pick out individual phrases and choruses that we enjoy. (Some bands, like Pavement and the Fall, take advantage of our inconsistent ears, and write bitter, gnarled verses in what seem to be cheerful pop songs.) Some people never learn the words to a favorite song—or transmute them into something more to their own taste. My friend Alma liked Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face” because she thought the title was “I supply the fish.” To my mind, this is a good thing, and not just because it lets me put out these collections of mondegreens. Pop songs aren’t Ph.D. dissertations, or instruction manuals: they’re supposed to be heard a million different ways, in a million different contexts. Customization is the only rational response to omnipresence.
So people continue to mangle lyrics, and to send me mondegreens by the bushel, either boldly owning up to their errors or cravenly blaming close friends and relatives for the mistake. And I make every human effort to separate the deliberate mishearings from those of the confused and befuddled; some of the most humiliating mistakes come from the most earnest sources. Misheard lyrics often become family legends, as evidenced by this letter from Daniel Brotschul of Gainesville, Florida: “I’ll never forget singing ‘Paperlate’ by Genesis while in the shower as an elementary school student. I thought it was ‘Paper Lake.’ When I got out of the shower, I was humiliated by my siblings, who mocked me, saying, ‘Look! You’re all wet! You’ve got confetti in your hair! Anyone want to go for a swim in Lake Memo?’”
Some folks get so confused by the lack of articulation in the musical world that they begin to mangle band names, and call Hüsker Dü the inappropriate “Who Skidoo.” This is why people mistakenly refer to Andy Gibb as “Auntie Gibb,” Hall and Oates as “Hollow Notes,” and Sam and Dave as “Salmon Dave.” It doesn’t, however, explain those who few who refer to Bruce Springsteen as “The Chief,” rather than “The Boss.”
Please do not be too quick to judge their errors. To put myself in a more charitable frame of mind, I need only recall my most embarassing mondegreen moment: singing along at the top of my lungs to a Go-Gos single at a party, convinced that the chorus was “Alex the Seal,” not “Our lips are sealed.”
This essay is adapted from the introductions to ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy, He’s Got the Whole World in His Pants, and When a Man Loves a Walnut.
Last edited by jorkel (2006-09-23 09:10:46)
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In the song “Moody River” from the ‘50s, as a child I heard ‘more deadly’ as MORTEDLY, having the meaning ‘mort = death’.
CHORUS

Moody river, more deadly than the vainest knife

Moody river, your muddy water took my baby’s life
As I grew up I realized that MORTEDLY was not a word, but never bothered to find out what the song said.
Recently, with the internet, it is easy and free to find out, so I did!

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jorkel wrote:
I think the concensus among linguists is that mondegreens (misheard song lyrics) are not eggcorns.
Whoa! Certainly, one cannot make a 1-1 correspondence and say “mondegreens are eggcorns (and eggcorns are mondegreens)â€. One cannot say “all eggcorns arise from mishearing song lyricsâ€. One could probably not say, either (though it depend on one’s definitions) “no mondegreen is ever an eggcorn.†It would be true, however, and useful, to say, “many, and probably most, eggcorns arise from the same sort of mishearing and misanalysis that produces mondegreens. Mondegreens and eggcorns are related categories.â€
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Mondegreens are not just “misheard song lyricsâ€. The article you quoted mentions “I led the pigeons to the flagâ€, which does not arise from anything sung. In Sylvia Green’s original article, where she coined the term “mondegreenâ€, she referred to “the wild, strange battle cry of the Light Brigade: ‘Haffely! Gaffely! Gaffely! Gonward!’’’ (wording may not be exact)—I have never heard the Charge of the Light Brigade sung, and doubt she had either.
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Typically mondegreens, for some of the reasons suggested in the article, arise with speech that is ritually repeated (as in singing, saying the Pledge, or reading poetry) whether it makes sense or not. They typically involve bizarre reshapings that make no sense in context: what do pigeons or leading them have to do with the flag? But if a mondegreen does make good sense for its context, just a different kind of sense from its original, then I think you do have a kind of eggcorn.
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In any case, call them mondegreens or call them by some other name, slips of the ear which result in non-standard imagery are a fascinating category of error, and the subset of them that becomes standard for some people an even more fascinating one. And many (not all) eggcorns are of that type.
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So, the consensus [sic] is not true unless the statement of it is nuanced.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-11-30 07:39:42)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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At the time Jorkel was writing—two years ago—most of the linguists talking about eggcorns (at least in a way visible to us laymen) were associated with Language Log. And the LL consensus was (and apparently still is) that mondegreens aren’t eggcorns.
Words like malapropism, typo, and mondegreen tend to develop both strict meanings and looser meanings, and “both” (I’m using quotes because it’s really a spectrum rather than a binary) are widely used. The mondegreen argument, for instance, has been going on for at least two years over at Wikipedia. When I was paying close attention two years ago, the “loose-definers” were definitely in charge, and the word was defined like this:
A mondegreen (also sometimes spelt ‘mondagreen’) is the mishearing (usually accidental) of a phrase, such that it acquires a new meaning.
That wasn’t an accident—there was at least one guy there at the time who was actively resisting a narrower definition. Eventually, some people balked at the broadness of that definition (and it has plenty of other problems, too), and those “strict-definers” pushed through a form that enshrines poems and lyrics as the typical habitat of the mondegreen:
A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song, due to near homophony.[1][2]
I’m pretty sure there were people who wanted it to be narrower still, but sooner or later you have to compromise on Wikipedia. And I imagine the loose-definer revision will be coming down the pipe if we wait long enough.
For me, a mondegreen is a mishearing of part of a poem or song. I realize that that’s a preference of mine, but it’s one shared by many who use the term. Anyone who tells me I’m just plain wrong is just plain wrong.
Is it possible that some mondegreens are eggcorns? Probably. Is overlap common enough to make the question much more than theoretical? Probably not. I’m not too bothered by the LL consensus.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-11-30 16:38:14)
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I would say the same thing about mondegreens that I said earlier about idiom blends. You do a thought experiment. If you can give a reasonably coherent explanation of a substitution without invoking a blended idiom to explain it, then it’s also an eggcorn, even if the occasion for it is a confusion of idioms. Likewise, if you could see a mondegreen happening without having recourse to a mishearing of recitation/poem/song lyrics, then it’s an eggcorn as well as a mondegreen.
Obviously, not many mondegreens can double as eggcorns. First, the alternate phrasings of a mondegreen are usually not related to the original phrases in sense (Indeed, the best mondegreens rely on the static created by the clash in meanings. Take, for example, “Gladly, the cross-eyed bear.”), and, second, the mishearing of the lyric/poem/recitation provides an almost indispensable occasion for the mistake (given, of course, Pat’s more restricted definition of a mondegreen). So while mondegreens can be eggcorns in principle, in practice they almost never are.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Kem wrote:
Likewise, if you could see a mondegreen happening without having recourse to a mishearing of recitation/poem/song lyrics, then it’s an eggcorn as well as a mondegreen.
Just a minute. Is that really what you mean? [Mondegreen – recitation/poem/song = eggcorn?] I think lots of mondegreens (wider definition, by definition) happen without a recitation/poem/song being involved, but the vast majority of them still aren’t eggcorns, because (1) they do not make sense in (most) contexts, and/or (2) they don’t become standard for anybody.
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(Of course, if they don’t make sense, they’re less likely to become standard. Also, if they get standardized, you’re more likely to take the time and effort to figure out a reason why they might make sense. We on this list are likely to do so anyway, but we’re odd.)
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kem also wrote:
So while mondegreens can be eggcorns in principle, in practice they almost never are.
I think that is true. Given the range of mondegreens, the percentage that are eggcorns is quite small. Its converse is less clearly so: i.e. it is not so clear that eggcorns in practice are almost never mondegreens. Given Pat’s more restricted definition, perhaps so. But many, perhaps most eggcorns are likely mondegrenous in origin: i.e. they arise from the same process that produces mondegreens. Someone hears a particular linguistic structure used, and in the process of trying to assign it meaning and structure in his own head, winds up assigning it a structure and a meaning different from the standard one. Most of the time this happens (at any level, not just when dealing with long phrases, songs, etc.) the new structure doesn’t make a lot of sense and doesn’t become standard for the person. Sometimes it becomes standard without making sense: this is more likely to happen with rote/ritualized language, but can also happen to single words or other structures we usually don’t think of as rote (e.g. youth-in-Asia << euthanasia). If the new structure does make sense in all or most of the contexts the original was used in, you have an eggcorn.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-12-03 22:50:08)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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