My Favorite Mondegreen

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What's a Mondegreen you ask. It's a mishearing of song lyrics often to hilarious results.
Quoting from the site that collects such things for all posterity, Center for the Humane Study of Mondegreens :

The word Mondegreen, meaning a mishearing of a popular phrase or song lyric, was coined by the writer Sylvia Wright.

As a child she had heard the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" and had believed that one stanza went like this:

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands Oh where hae you been? They hae slay the Earl of Murray, And Lady Mondegreen.

Poor Lady Mondegreen, thought Sylvia Wright. A tragic heroine dying with her liege; how poetic. When it turned out, some years later, that what they had actually done was slay the Earl of Murray and lay him on the green, Wright was so distraught by the sudden disappearance of her heroine that she memorialized her with a neologism.

And here's my favorite Mondegreene :

"I pledge a lesion to the flag, of the United State of America, and to the republic for Richard Stans, one naked individual, with liver tea and just this for all."

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This page contains a single entry by cul published on August 26, 2011 7:34 AM.

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