There’s a term for misheard song lyrics: they’re “mondegreens”. Many people have experienced this, or something like it — you hear a line from a song that doesn’t quite make sense until you find out that the real lyric isn’t what you thought you heard. For example, a lot of people apparently heard “the girl with colitis goes by” (instead of “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes”) when they first listened to “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”. I didn’t, but I wasn’t stoned at the time, as those people probably were.
The word mondegreen comes from the canonical example. In the Scottish ballad “The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray” these lines occur: “They have slain the Earl o’ Moray, and laid him on the green”. The author Sylvia Wright heard this as “they have slain the Earl Amurray, and Lady Mondegreen”. Wright made this the basis of an article in Harper’s Magazine; she called it a “mondegreen”, and the name has stuck.
There’s an excellent article in Wikipedia on mondegreens and related phenomena: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen. I first heard of mondegreens in the 1990s in the San Francisco Chronicle, where Jon Carroll wrote an annual column about them. There are now many articles online, containing many other examples. I haven’t seen one of my favorites in any of these articles, though: “Stand beside her and guide her through the night with the light from a bulb”.
I personally encountered an excellent mondegreen when I was playing cello in the orchestra at Limestone High School. We were playing the Farandole from Bizet’s L’Arlésienne. Whoever was responsible for the program apparently misheard this as “Foreign Doll”, because that’s how it came out in print.
I’m not sure I have any true mondegreens of my own to report. As far as I’m concerned, true mondegreens are based on mishearings that are genuine, involuntary, and persistent. More commonly I find that when I hear something that doesn’t sound right, I immediately analyze it and correct myself. I assume that’s the experience of others, too.
Nevertheless, I have a small collection of what I call “demimondegreens” — deliberate perversions of song titles and lyrics. These aren’t parodies, just snatches of things for which I hear alternate versions in my head, even though I know perfectly well what the real words are.
For instance:
In The Mikado, Pooh-Bah sings “She’ll toddle away, as all aver, with the Lord High Executioner.” I think that Yum-Yum is, for some reason, going to change her name: “She’ll toddle away as Oliver …”
I have a set of demimondegreens that I call “The Sado-Masochist’s Gershwin Song Book”:
-- "Someone to Walk Over Me"
-- "I've Gotta Crush My Baby on You"
-- "Slap That Bass"
To me, the original German text of "None but the Lonely Heart" shows that Goethe had an appreciation of Italian opera. Instead of "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" I hear "Nur Verdi Sehnsucht kennt".
You'd better be sitting down for the last one. I hear it as a joke, which you won't get if you haven't driven Interstate 5 in Southern California:
Q: Mr. Cattle Rancher from Bakersfield, how do you get your stock to Los Angeles?
A: I herd it through the Grapevine.
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