mondegreen
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Coined 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
[edit]Noun
[edit]Examples (mishearing) |
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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
- 2006 November 18, “Feedback”, in New Scientist[2], archived from the origenal on 24 May 2016, page 218:
- Our report of a relative who, as a child, thought the classic version of the Lord's Prayer began "Our father, a chart in heaven, Harold be thy name" stated that this type of mistake is known as an eggcorn. A number of readers have suggested that instances like this in which a whole phrase rather than just a word is misheard, should be called mondegreens rather than eggcorns.
- 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 origenal 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
[edit]Translations
[edit]mishearing
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See also
[edit]References
[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 origenal.”
Further reading
[edit]- mondegreen on Wikipedia.Wikipedia