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Old 12-13-2007, 06:52 PM   #1
Cloud
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Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 8,360
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!
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