The Death of Lady Mondegreen

I've always thought it was cute the way kids hear words and repeat them. Mostly because they're almost right but not really. I was reminded of this today when Adara told me "I'm so cold. Oh no, I got chill-dumps!" And last night she was asking for her "poke-a-lots" blanket (which would be her polka dots blanket). I've been trying to remember others that she's said but I just can't (which always happens when you really want to remember something). But my mom gave me a great one, we were talking and Adara asked Nana to beat-box (funny in itself I know) and Mom said something like, "Sweetie I'm not good at bebopping." Of course Adara thought this was hilarious and got Nana to say it a few more times before I told Mom that it was "beat-boxing."

So this got me to thinking and I found that these misheard words or phrases have a name! How cool is that. They're called Mondegreens, and they way they got the name happened when writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in an essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen." In the essay she described that as a child she misheard the final line of the first stanza from the 17th century ballad ""The Bonnie Earl O' Murray." She remembered it as:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,

Oh, where hae ye been?

They hae slain the Earl Amurray, [sic]

And Lady Mondegreen.

The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green." As Wright explained the need for a new term, "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original." What's really cool is that this word has been accepted as a new word officially by Merriam-Webster since there was no word to describe this occurrence. You can even submit your favorite mondegreen to the Merriam-Webster folks for their collection.

Edit: we've added another to the list, chicken casserole is now known as chicken castle.