{"id":4044,"date":"2020-06-05T14:23:39","date_gmt":"2020-06-05T14:23:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kinneybrothers.com\/blog\/?p=4044"},"modified":"2024-04-20T17:20:40","modified_gmt":"2024-04-20T17:20:40","slug":"fun-facts-56-mondegreen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kinneybrothers.com\/blog\/blog\/2020\/06\/05\/fun-facts-56-mondegreen\/","title":{"rendered":"Fun Facts About English #56 – Mondegreens"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Fun<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The term mondegreen<\/em>, itself a mondegreen, was coined in 1954 by American writer Sylvia Wright in a Harper’s Magazine article titled, The Death of Lady Mondegreen<\/a>. A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase occurring most often when listening to a poem or song. Steven Connor<\/a>, of the University of Cambridge<\/a>, suggests that mondegreens are “the result of the brain’s attempts to make sense by filling in the gaps when it cannot clearly determine what it is hearing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ve all had the embarrassing experience of mistaking the lyrics of a popular song. Sometimes there’s a need to correct a friend or child’s hilariously misinterpreted verse or phrase in a sing-along. Just as surprising (or confusing) is when mondegreens are used to deliberately encode a phrase or bemuse the listener, as in the case of reverse mondegreens. There are also numerous examples where a mondegreen becomes collectively accepted as the original!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our sometimes buggy inability to grasp or interpret words can be easily demonstrated with a game of Chinese Whispers<\/em> (Telephone<\/em> in North America). This involves consecutively repeating a whispered sentence to produce successive mondegreens that gradually and inevitably distort the original sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another closely associated linguistic term, orony<\/em>m, refers to a pair of phrases that are homophonic. One example is “ice cream” and “I scream,” as in, “I scream; you scream; we all scream for ice cream.” “Four Candles,” a comedy sketch from the British show, The Two Ronnies<\/a><\/em>, is built entirely around oronyms and begins when a customer’s request for “fork handles” is misheard as “four candles.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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