Hearing isn鈥檛 always believing with 鈥榤ondegreens鈥�
It鈥檚 rare to be able to pinpoint the very first use of a word, but we can with mondegreen. In a 1954 article in Harper鈥檚 Magazine, Sylvia Wright describes how, when she was a child, her mother would read to her a Scottish ballad, which began 鈥淭hey hae slain the Earl Amurray, / And Lady Mondegreen.鈥澛�
Wright explains that she had a vivid mental image of this beautiful, brave woman, and was sorely disappointed when she learned that the lady is not, in fact, part of the poem 鈥� when they killed the earl, they 鈥渓aid him on the green.鈥� Thus mondegreen became a term for 鈥渁 word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung.鈥�
Though the word is quite recent, the phenomenon is not.聽
Renaissance dramatists loved mondegreens. Shakespeare鈥檚 鈥淭he Merry Wives of Windsor,鈥� for example, features a whole scene of them, when the innkeeper Mistress Quickly has trouble understanding a Latin lesson and interprets pulcher (鈥渂eautiful鈥�) as 鈥減olecats.鈥澛�
Sigmund Freud thought that some mondegreens 鈥� 惫别谤丑枚谤别苍 (鈥渕ishearing鈥�) in German 鈥� were the aural equivalent of the better-known 鈥淔reudian slips.鈥� He theorized that such mistakes represent suppressed emotions or anxieties. If a man hears 鈥渂ald egg鈥� instead of 鈥渂oiled egg,鈥� for example, Freudians might assume that he is embarrassed about losing his hair. 聽
Linguists, however, argue that such errors are a result of how we make sense of what we hear. In noisy restaurants, we might find it hard to make out which sounds our companion is producing. In this case, we have to make some guesses. Which words do the sounds most resemble? What is the context of the conversation? What is our friend likely to say?聽
University of Pennsylvania professor Mark Liberman explains, 鈥淭here鈥檚 a piece of what we understand that comes from the sound that comes in our ear,鈥� but 鈥渢here鈥檚 a piece of what we understand that comes from [our] expectations.鈥� If you hear something like 鈥渆esees鈥� and are discussing candy, you might think 鈥淩eese鈥檚鈥�; if you are talking about ecology, 鈥渟pecies鈥� might come to mind instead.聽
Linguist Steven Pinker points out that some mondegreens challenge this theory of speech perception, since they 鈥渄o not bear out any sane listener鈥檚 general expectations.鈥� One recent example is from 2014鈥檚 鈥淏lank Space,鈥� where millions of people heard Taylor Swift singing 鈥淎ll the lonely Starbucks lovers鈥� instead of her actual line, 鈥淕ot a long list of ex-lovers.鈥澛�
Perhaps wildly misheard lyrics like these reveal more about our expectations for pop stars 鈥� they might say anything 鈥� than about language processing. And, as Shakespeare understood, sometimes it鈥檚 just more fun to get it wrong.
