eggcornish?

[Mark Mandel]

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 6:08 PM, Brenda Lester <alphatwin2002 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> From a YAHOO! article about M-W's new words:And then there's "mondegreen." =
> In a category of its own, it describes words mistaken for other words. A mo=
> ndegreen most often comes from misunderstood phrases or lyrics. It comes fr=
> om an old Scottish ballad in which the lyric "laid him on the green" has be=
> en confused over time with "Lady Mondegreen."=A0bl=A0=A0=A0=A0-------------=

Coined 1954. From OED Online:

1954 S. WRIGHT in Harper's Mag. Nov. 49/1 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.

----------

>From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen):

The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term mondegreen in an
essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," which was published in Harper's
Magazine in November 1954.[1] In the essay, Wright described how, as a
young girl, she misheard the final line from the 17th century ballad
"The Bonnie Earl O' Murray." She wrote:

   When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from
Percy's Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

       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."

--------------

Google claims "about 87,500" hits for the word, including
http://www.topix.com/forum/news/weird/T1V3UV7OI52D2T8N3/post1
which you seem to be quoting.

m a m

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