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From Canadian Headhunter, we get this most excellent wanted word: mondegreen. It means:

A series of words that result from the mishearing or misinterpretation of a statement or song lyric. For example, I led the pigeons to the flag for I pledge allegiance to the flag.

Excellent. Another needful gap in my vocabulary closed. Another 145,000 words and I’ll know them all. The first personal mondegreen that comes to mind is for Sarah McLachlan’s Building a Mystery. I heard ‘you strech your ass to wear’ when the actual line, of course, is ‘you strut your rasta wear’. Who knew? If you consult KissThisGuy.com, you see that others agreed with me. Am I Right is another similar resource.

Mondegreens–a cautionary tale in musical pronounciation. Rock mumblers of the world, take note.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 30th, 2004 at 9:24 am and is filed under Words. Tag Testing Project: No Tags. Photo by . You can skip to the end and leave a response, or trackback from your own site. If you don't see your comment within a day or so, drop me an email. Sometimes my comment spam filter gets overly zealous.