Ever misheard a lyric? Well, you may have found yourself a Mondegreen. Sarah Lang investigates…
A few weeks ago, a friend of 30 years sent me a link to an article which says “a person has been identified who has never heard the lyrics to a song correctly in their entire lifetime” and mentions their perpetual state of “cringing embarrassment”. This is a mondegreen: a word or phrase that results from mishearing and misinterpreting a song lyric.
I laughed so much that I spat out my tea. I’d never heard of the word mondegreen. Now I’ve done some research.
It turns out that autistic people and children are quite likely to hear mondegreens. But many neurotypical adults do, too. I had a feeling I’d created a mondegreen or two. Maybe more, given my friend sent me that article.
The term mondegreen was coined by writer Sylvia Wright in 1954, when she misheard a lyric in Scottish ballad ‘The Bonny Earl o’ Moray’. She thought ‘laid him on the green’ was ‘Lady Mondegreen’.
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen
She thought Lady Mondegreen got slain too. In a humorous article called ‘The Death of Lady Mondegreen’ published in Harper’s, Wright imagines their doomed love story.
Here’s a more recent example. In Taylor Swift song ‘Blank Space,’ some people thought ‘got a long list of ex-lovers’ was ‘all the lonely Starbucks lovers’
It really does sound like that! Swift tweeted “sending my love to all the lonely Starbucks lovers out there this Valentine’s Day… even though it’s not the correct lyric”. @Starbucks tweeted back “Wait, it’s not?”.
Here’s what is apparently one of the most common mondegreens. In ‘Blinded by the Light’ – a cover of a Bruce Springsteen song by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – Springsteen’s line ‘cut loose like a deuce’ is changed to ‘revved up like a deuce’. It really does sound like ‘wrapped up like a douche’! Springsteen joked that the song only became popular after Mann rewrote it to be about a feminine hygiene product.
My Mondegreens
So, it turns out I’ve been cheerfully belting out the wrong lyrics for decades. In my defence, when I tipsily sung along 20 to 25 years ago, I was usually at parties or bars, rather than putting a CD on or making a playlist. The wrong lyrics just stuck, without me realising.
Now I’ve worked out what my worst offences have been, by looking up common mondegreens and combing through YouTube videos with the correct lyrics (they’re linked below).
- In the song ‘Purple Haze’ by Jimi Hendrix, I thought it was ‘acting funny, but I don’t know why, excuse me while I kiss this guy’ when it’s actually ‘kiss the sky’. I mean, haven’t we all acted funny before we kiss someone, and isn’t it more common to kiss a guy than kiss the sky? At concerts, when he heard people singing ‘kiss this guy’, Jimi Hendrix would sometimes point to bandmates as if to say ‘there it is again!’. Also, he occasionally sang the mondegreen version, and sometimes he’d pretend to kiss the bassist. Legend.
- With the song ‘Bad Moon Rising’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival, I thought ‘there’s a bad moon on the rise’ was ‘there’s a bathroom on the right’. Look, it’s always good to know where the bathroom is! And I’m not the only one. In concerts, for fun, Creedence’s John Fogerty occasionally sings ‘there’s a bathroom on the right’.
- In Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ On a Prayer’, I thought it was ‘she says we’ve gotta hold on to what we’ve got, it really doesn’t matter if we’re naked or not, we’ve got each other and that’s a lot’. (It should of course be ‘make it or not’.) I guess I thought she was saying the relationship shouldn’t be based solely on sex? Also I thought it was ‘that’s a lot, oh oh, we’ll give it a shot’, when it’s ‘that’s a lot, for love, we’ll give it a shot’.
- In Nirvana song ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, rather than ‘here we are now, entertain us, I feel stupid and contagious’, I cluelessly sung ‘here we are now, entertain us, and the future, will contain us’. I’ve listened again and I think it’s still hard to hear ‘contagious’ in the song. Also, why sing about being contagious?
- I also thought ‘bring me a higher love’ was ‘bring me a pile of love’, even though this Steve Winward song is called ‘Bring Me a Higher Love’. (Apparently, some think it’s ‘bake me a pie of love’. Fair enough: we’ve long been told that food is the way to a man’s heart.)
- Even worse, I misheard ‘I’m your Venus’ as ‘I’m your penis’. Hey, it is followed by ‘I’m your fire, your desire’! Embarrassingly for me, The Bangles’ song is actually called ‘I’m Your Venus’.
TBH I find this more funny than embarrassing.
Here are other common mondegreens (again linked to videos of the lyrics).
- In Paul Young’s song ‘Every Time You Go Away’, some people mishear ‘you take a piece of me with you’ as ‘you take a piece of meat with you’. I’m in no position to judge, but a love song isn’t usually set at a butcher’s!
- In ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ by Bob Dylan, some misheard ‘the answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind’ as ‘the ants are my friends, blowin’ in the wind’. Yes, really.
- In ‘What a Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong, some people think ‘the bright blessed day, the dark sacred night’ is ‘the bright blessed day, the dogs say goodnight’. Maybe these people have dogs? It really does sound like ‘the dogs say goodnight’.
- In ‘Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds’, the line goes ‘somebody called you, you answered quite slowly, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes’. Apparently some have heard it as ‘the girl with colitis goes by’. But the Beatles weren’t singing about a girl with this inflammatory colon disease.
- In Rolling Stones’ song ‘Beast of Burden’, some have misheard ‘I’ll never be your beast of burden’ as ‘I’ll never leave your pizza burning’. Um, pizza seems somewhat unrelated to a love song unless the girl really likes pizza?
- Speaking of food, in Neil Diamond’s song ‘Red Red Wine’, ‘red red wine, stay close to me’ has been misheard as ‘red red wine, steak lobster meal…’. (I wish I could claim this one.)
Mondegreens Make Sense?
There’s actually a book about this! In Mondegreens: A Book of Mishearings, J. A. Wines (yep, her real name) writes that “mondegreens often occur because the English language is rich in homophones – words which may not be the same in origin, spelling or meaning, but which sound the same”.
In Psychology Today story ‘Mondegreens: When Lyrics Play Tricks on Your Mind’, author Maggie Rowe writes “have you ever confidently belted out the wrong lyrics to a song, only to be met with laughter or confusion? You’re not alone”. She says mondegreens “are proof that we do not see – or in this case, hear – the world as it is but as we are”.
“Our brains take ambiguous sounds; apply cultural context, personal bias, and psychological baggage; and create a version of reality that is ours and ours alone.”
“The official term for this neurological skullduggery is ‘top-down processing’. Your brain cheats, in other words. It makes shortcuts, fills in gaps, and essentially improvises, like a jazz musician on acid. It uses memory, expectation, and context to create something that makes sense.”
She mentions the Beatles’ song ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. “Apparently, a lot of people hear ‘I get high’ instead of the actual lyrics ‘I can’t hide’. Now, on the surface, this is just another mondegreen, but dig a little deeper, and you’ll see the shimmering glint of cultural context. You see, the Beatles were the messiahs of counterculture. They led the charge into psychedelia and experimentation. Society wants to hear them singing about getting high because it fits the narrative.”
Right, so what might my mondegreens say about me? I mean, when I was singing these songs 20-plus years ago, I’m sure I excused myself to kiss a guy at a party or bar, and I definitely had to ask where the bathroom was. As for my mishearing of ‘penis’ over ‘venus’, and ‘naked or not’ over ‘make it or not’, I was in my single-girl-having-fun stage.
In her amusing article about Lady Mondegreen, Wright writes 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”.
“You have only to decide which is to be the master, you or the word. I am for the word.”
Me too. Long live the mondegreen, if only to make us laugh.