[2][3] The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, recalling a childhood memory of her mother reading the Scottish ballad "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray", and mishearing the words "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen".
[4][5] In a 1954 essay in Harper's Magazine, Sylvia Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the last line of the first stanza from the ballad "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray" (from Thomas Percy's 1765 book Reliques of Ancient English Poetry).
[7] Similarly, if a lyric uses words or phrases that the listener is unfamiliar with, or in an uncommon sentence structure, they may be misheard as using more familiar terms.
[20] Jon Carroll and many others quote it as "Gladly the cross I'd bear";[3] note that the confusion may be heightened by the unusual object-subject-verb (OSV) word order of the phrase.
Among the most-reported examples are:[24][3] Both Creedence's John Fogerty and Hendrix eventually acknowledged these mishearings by deliberately singing the "mondegreen" versions of their songs in concert.
[29][30][31] "Blinded by the Light", a cover of a Bruce Springsteen song by Manfred Mann's Earth Band, contains what has been called "probably the most misheard lyric of all time".
[34][c] Another commonly cited example of a song susceptible to mondegreens is Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", with the line "here we are now, entertain us" variously being misinterpreted as "here we are now, in containers",[35][36] and "here we are now, hot potatoes",[37] among other renditions.
In the 2014 song "Blank Space" by Taylor Swift, listeners widely misheard the line "got a long list of ex-lovers" as "all the lonely Starbucks lovers.
[47] A Monk Swimming by author Malachy McCourt is so titled because of a childhood mishearing of a phrase from the Catholic rosary prayer, Hail Mary.
[51] The title of the 2013 film Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a misheard lyric from a folk song; director David Lowery decided to use it because it evoked the "classical, regional" feel of 1970s rural Texas.
[53] Mondegreens have been used in many television advertising campaigns, including: The traditional game Chinese whispers ("Telephone" or "Gossip" in North America) involves mishearing a whispered sentence to produce successive mondegreens that gradually distort the original sentence as it is repeated by successive listeners.
Among schoolchildren in the US, daily rote recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance has long provided opportunities for the genesis of mondegreens.
It has been noted that in text messaging, users often leave uncorrected mondegreens as a joke or puzzle for the recipient to solve.
[66][67] The classicist and linguist Steve Reece has collected examples of English mondegreens in song lyrics, religious creeds and liturgies, commercials and advertisements, and jokes and riddles.
He has used this collection to shed light on the process of "junctural metanalysis" during the oral transmission of the ancient Greek epics, the Iliad and Odyssey.
[69] A prominent example is Mairzy Doats, a 1943 novelty song by Milton Drake, Al Hoffman, and Jerry Livingston.
[70] The lyrics are a reverse mondegreen, made up of same-sounding words or phrases (sometimes also referred to as "oronyms"),[71] so pronounced (and written) as to challenge the listener (or reader) to interpret them: The clue to the meaning is contained in the bridge of the song: That makes it clear that the last line is "A kid'll eat ivy, too; wouldn't you?
Luis van Rooten's pseudo-French Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames includes critical, historical, and interpretive apparatus, as does John Hulme's Mörder Guss Reims, attributed to a fictitious German poet.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced a similar effect in his canon "Difficile Lectu" (Difficult to Read), which, though ostensibly in Latin, is actually an opportunity for scatological humor in both German and Italian.
The lyrics are intentionally obscure (for instance, "Everybody sugar in my bed" and "Perhaps the pollen in the air turns us into a stapler") and spoken hastily to encourage the mondegreen effect.
[82][83] The title of the 1983 French novel Le Thé au harem d'Archi Ahmed ("Tea in the Harem of Archi Ahmed") by Mehdi Charef (and the 1985 movie of the same name) is based on the main character mishearing le théorème d'Archimède ("the theorem of Archimedes") in his mathematics class.
A classic example in French is similar to the "Lady Mondegreen" anecdote: in his 1962 collection of children's quotes La Foire aux cancres, the humorist Jean-Charles[84][better source needed] refers to a misunderstood lyric of "La Marseillaise" (the French national anthem): Entendez-vous ... mugir ces féroces soldats ("Do you hear those savage soldiers roar?")
They are sometimes called, after a well-known example, Agathe Bauer-songs ("I got the power", a song by Snap!, misinterpreted as a German female name).
[87] In urban legend, children's paintings of nativity scenes, occasionally include next to the Child, Mary, Joseph, and so on, an additional, laughing creature known as the Owi.
[93] The word "mendengarku" ("hear me") in Ghea Indrawari's song, "Teramini", is misheard as "mantan aku" ("my ex") or "makananku" ("my food").