The Cellar - Your favorite mondegreens?

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Your favorite mondegreens?

"Olive the Other Reindeer?" "Scuse me, while I kiss this guy?"

While (ahem!) researching the lyrics to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, I found out that those misheard lyrics and similar auditory misconceptions are called "mondegreens." According to the Word (aka Wikipedia),

Quote:

The American writer Sylvia Wright coined it in an essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen", which was published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954.[1] She wrote:

When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques. One of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray, [sic]
And Lady Mondegreen.

The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green", . . . other examples of what she says, "I shall hereafter call mondegreens," such as:

Surely/Shirley, Good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life ("Surely goodness and mercy…" from Psalm 23)

The wild, strange battle cry "Haffely, Gaffely, Gaffely, Gonward." ("Half a league, half a league,/ Half a league onward," from "The Charge of the Light Brigade")

well, at least I got a new word out of it!

Well, it's not a song lyric, but I'm a fan of "piggyback ride."

It actually used to be "pick-a-back ride," believe it or not. Scout's honor.

yeah, but I think that is more of an example of language drift. Words get condensed and the sounds elided over time with use.

I think a mondegreen is more of a lyric, song title, or line of poetry misheard or misunderstood.

"Revved up like a douche, another runner in the night"

There used to be a column in the Saturday Independent dedicated to misheard lyrics, I loved it.

One of my faves was a song out at the time of reading that had the line, "Angels, angels, kick-ass angels" which the contributor was castigated by his daughter for singing as, "Angels, angels, Kit-Kat angels."

There's a bathroom on the right.

This thread is actually inspired by word, "mondegreen" which I thought was cool. Less about song lyrics.

In the same vein but literarily, Patrick O'Brian's hero Captain Jack Aubrey is once or twice in the book series said to scour the Royal Navy's Navy List for mention of the Admiral Crichton he was sure had to be in there somewhere. He knew he'd heard of the guy.

A Page of Aubreyisms -- scroll down to The Fortune of War, about a fifth of the way.