Joy to the visions that the people see

That's an example of what mondegreens be

Sam Allis writes: “Where did the term mondegreen come from? I’d never heard it before, but I’ve loved the idea ever since I heard someone on NPR assemble a bunch of fabulous ones over a decade ago. There simply must be annual competitions.

“What made the NPR ones great is that the people swallowed their pride and sang them, only to burst out laughing after each one. I fell in love with them all. What’s so charming about mondegreens is how willing people are to own up to their silly versions of things, egos be gone. In ‘Walk away Renee,’ I sang for years about ‘the lemon man up on the wall.’”

Photo by Keagan Henman on Unsplash

Sam, I love mondegreens too, and here’s something you may not know about them: They’re a subset of eggcorns.

I discussed both in 2022 in “May I have a word,” my biweekly Boston Globe column. An eggcorn, as defined by Oxford Languages, is “a word or phrase that results from a mishearing or misinterpretation of another” word — for example, tow the line instead of toe the line.

Eggcorn turns up in dictionaries even though the term is rather new: Coined by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum, it first appeared in a 2003 blog post about the case of a woman who substituted the phrase egg corn for the word acorn. Relatively common eggcorns include ex-patriot for expatriate, for all intensive purposes instead of for all intents and purposes, and old-timers’ disease for Alzheimer’s disease.

When an eggcorn stems from song lyrics, it’s called a mondegreen. A well-known one is the interpretation of “’Scuse me while I kiss the sky” in Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” as “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”

The name for these mishearings comes from a 1954 Harper’s Magazine article by Sylvia Wright. She explained that when she was a child, her mother had often read her the lyrics of a 17th-century ballad whose first stanza goes like this:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,

Oh, where hae ye been?

They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,

And laid him on the green.

Young Sylvia — the grown-up Sylvia reported — long believe that the stanza concluded with “And Lady Mondegreen.”

Here are a few of my favorite mondegreens:

From The Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night”: “And when I get home to you, I find a broken canoe.”

From Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”: “The ants are my friends.”

And from that rousing abolitionist anthem the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord / He has trampled on the village where the great giraffe is stored.”

I published a second column about mondegreens the next year, which taught me that there are only so many of them that are widely familiar. People in their 20s may no more familiar with Jimi Hendrix’s lyrics than I am with Taylor Swift’s.

That may be why I was unable to hunt up any annual mondegreen competitions. Last August Phish put on a festival named Mondegreen, but that’s beside the point.

Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.