Sylvia Wright argued a mishearing beat the original
In a 1954 Harper's essay, Wright turned the ballad line "and laid him on the green" into a mourning for a noblewoman, Lady Mondegreen, who never existed.
A word or phrase that results from a mishearing, especially of something recited or sung.1
The ballad gained a mourner who never lived
"The Bonnie Earl o' Moray" ends its first verse plainly: "They hae slain the Earl o' Moray, / And laid him on the green."2 Sylvia Wright grew up hearing her mother read those lines from Percy's Reliques, and heard something else entirely: not a body laid in the grass but a companion in his death, "and Lady Mondegreen."3 The earl was murdered in 1592, and the ballad names no one beside him.2 In Wright's ear, for years, a noblewoman had died loyally at his side, and she mourned a woman who had never drawn breath.3 The swap worked because it made its own sense: a preposition and a color, sung fast enough, land on the ear exactly where a title and a name would.
A magazine word waited decades for a dictionary
Wright named the error herself, in an essay she titled after her own mistake, "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," later collected in her book Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts.3 Her reason for coining a new word was blunt: "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."3 The word she coined stayed a language columnists' favorite for a generation before any dictionary caught up. Jack Smith revived it in the Los Angeles Times on March 18, 1973, and William Safire endorsed it in his own "On Language" column on May 27, 1979.4 Only then did the dictionaries follow: the Oxford English Dictionary entered it in 2002, and Merriam-Webster in 2008, both crediting Wright's essay as the first known use.5
Only the ear's mistake earns this name
Two neighboring terms get mistaken for mondegreen, and each keeps its own kind of mistake. An eggcorn keeps its logic: "for all intensive purposes" swaps in words that still make sense together, even though "intents and purposes" is correct.6 A malapropism swaps in a word that only sounds similar, with no logic behind the trade, the way a line in Sheridan's play traded "pineapple" for "pinnacle."7 A mondegreen answers to neither test. It is a slip of the ear, not the tongue, and it turns the hymn line "Gladly the cross I'd bear" into "Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear," nonsense sung with total confidence.4 Mishear a sound and the result is a mondegreen. Reach for a sensible word and it is an eggcorn. Reach for a wrong one and it is a malapropism.
Sources
- Merriam-Webster · "Mondegreen" (definition, pronunciation, first known use 1954)
- "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray" (Scottish ballad, Scottish Poetry Library text)
- Sylvia Wright · "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," Harper's Magazine (November 1954)
- Word Origins · "Mondegreen" (Jack Smith's March 18, 1973 Los Angeles Times revival; William Safire's May 27, 1979 "On Language" column; the "Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear" mishearing)
- Wikipedia · "Mondegreen" (Oxford English Dictionary addition in 2002; Merriam-Webster entering the dictionary in 2008)
- Merriam-Webster · "'For all intensive purposes' vs. 'for all intents and purposes'" (usage note, the eggcorn example)
- Merriam-Webster · "Mondegreens, Eggcorns, Malapropisms, Spoonerism, Freudian Slip"