mondegreen
English
editEtymology
editCoined by American journalist and editor Sylvia Wright in 1954 in Harper's Magazine[1] from mishearing a line in the Scottish ballad The Bonnie Earl o' Moray: “They have slain the Earl o' Moray, / And laid him on the green”, the second line being misheard as, “And Lady Mondegreen”.
Pronunciation
editNoun
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mondegreen (plural mondegreens)
- (linguistics) A form of (possibly intentional) error arising from mishearing a spoken or sung phrase, possibly in a different language. [from 1954]
- Synonym: mishearing
- 2012, Gary Rosen, Unfair to Genius: The Strange and Litigious Career of Ira B. Arnstein, Oxford University Press, →ISBN:
- The title lyric ["Bei Mir Bistu Shein"], the only part of the original Yiddish preserved by Cahn, was a mondegreen waiting to happen—“My Mere Bits of Shame” and “My Beer, Mr. Shane” were among the earliest recorded mishearings—but the language barrier didn't […]
- (rare) A misunderstanding of a written or spoken phrase as a result of multiple definitions.
Coordinate terms
editTranslations
editmishearing
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See also
editReferences
edit- ^ Sylvia Wright (1954 November) “The Death of Lady Mondegreen”, in Harper's Magazine[1], volume 209, number 1254, pages 48–51: “The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original.”
Further reading
edit- mondegreen on Wikipedia.Wikipedia