Urban Legends Reference Pages: Christmas Carol Mondegreens
Posted by bobodod on 23 December, 2007
From Snopes:
The Red and the Mondegreen
Legend: Misheard lyrics to Christmas songs are immortalized as ‘mondegreens.’
Origins: The term ‘mondegreen’ — representing a series of words resulting from the mishearing of a statement or song lyric — is generally attributed to Sylvia Wright, who is credited with coining the neologism in a 1954 Harper’s column. Ms. Wright was chagrined to discover that for many years she had misunderstood the last line of the first stanza in the Scottish folk ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray,” which reads:
Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands,
Oh! Where ha’e ye been:
They ha’e slain the Earl of Murray,
And they laid him on the Green.Ms. Wright misheard this stanza as:
Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands,
Oh! Where ha’e ye been:
They ha’e slain the Earl of Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.From the disappearance of Sylvia Wright’s tragic heroine, Lady Mondegreen, came the term for describing unconventional interpretations or understandings of oral repetition, usually in the form of song lyrics.
Christmas carols and other holiday songs, rife as they are with seldom-heard words and phrasings and clever wordplay, are fertile fields for the sowing of mondegreens — especially when children, with their limited vocabularies, are involved. (We note that Mondegreens are based upon a genuine misunderstanding of lyrics, a distinctly different phenomenon than the deliberate creation of parodic lyrics such as “Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg,” or “We three kings of Orient are; tried to smoke a rubber cigar.”)
Over the years we’ve collected a variety of Christmas mondegreens from books, Internet postings, and reader e-mail. The table displayed below presents mangled Christmas lyrics (with the mondegreened lines bolded and italicized) in the left-hand column, while the correct lyrics are shown in the right-hand column.
Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2007
Follow the link to see the Christmas carol mondegreens: http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/humor/mondegreens.asp
