mondegreens

And if you listen to pop music much, you’ve no doubt confused the lyrics.  These mishearings are called mondegreens from the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray,” whose line “And laid him on the green” was misheard by some as “And Lady Mondegreen.”  The poet Henry Taylor wrote a delightful poem called “The Parrot Bath” on mishearing the word “paragraph.”  On a book tour a few years ago, I sat with my driver Frank at a sidewalk café in Berkeley waiting to do an NPR radio show around the corner.  Frank told me that he was into media rights, and I wasn’t sure what he meant.  He said he collects them, buys them on the Internet.  I smiled.   He’s got twelve of them on his bookcase gathering dust.  I realized then that he meant meteorites.  He’s investing in meteorites.  I had a whole other story going on in my head.  There are actually a few words, perhaps many, that came into the language as mishearings.  Asparagus is a mishearing of “sparrow-grass.”  “Buttonhole” was first “buttonhold.”