In high school I had a friend (who shall remain nameless for embarrassment reasons) who use to sing very loudly in the car. On one particular trip with Pearl Jam’s “Go” blaring, she belt out “Don’t go! Don’t go wombat!”
Now, why Eddie Vedder would be singing about a wombat, or why he didn’t want it to leave, I don’t know. The actual lyrics are “Don’t go/ Don’t go on me!”
You can’t make fun too much, as we’ve all misheard lyrics. A recent mishearing of mine is from Patrick Watson’s “Into Giants.” For some strange reason I thought he was singing “Scottish lovers” instead of “Started as lovers” (I’ve never had one, so I was intrigued, I suppose.)
Did you know there is a proper term for misheard lyrics? The word actually stems from one, having its origins in the childhood of author Sylvia Wright. She heard a line in the Scottish ballad, “The Bonny Earl of Murray” as “Thou hae slay the Earl of Murray, And Lady Mondegreen.”
Eventually, Wright realized that Lady Mondegreen didn’t exist. The line is "laid him on the green." The mix-up inspired the term mondegreen, now used to describe words mistaken for other words, most often in lyrics.
Wright coined the term in 1954 and mondegreen was added to the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary in 2000.
WHAT ARE SOME OF THE FUNNIEST LYRICS YOU'VE MISHEARD?
Ever find any hilarious ones on lyric sites?
Post them in the comments below and we promise not to laugh at you.
Sources: SF Gate, Word Detective, Fun With Words, Wikipedia
posted by
Lana Gay
on Jul 10, 2012