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Restrictions, which you can review below. Republish under a Creative Commons License, and we encourage you to To that end, most Stacker stories are freely available to Stacker believes in making the world’s data more accessible through You may also like: What 50 famous musical acts looked like at the start of their careers From 'hold me closer Tony Danza' to 'there's a wino down the road,' read on to clear up some of the biggest mondegreens in music history. Stacker rounded up 50 famously misheard songs, explaining what's actually being said. You can blame it on the overwhelming amount of auditory signals, like instruments and background singers, or the fact that some words and phrases just sound remarkably like others, but chances are you've had at least one instance in your life where you've misheard what the singer is saying. One place we see this happen a lot is in song lyrics. It's not exactly entirely clear why this happens, we just know that it does. The acoustic information that's received and the interpretation a brain comes up with simply don't match up.

This is essentially what happens in the childhood game of 'telephone.' As one friend whispers a word or phrase into another's ear, it can become wildly distorted, and a totally different word or phrase can come out the other side. According to the author, when she was young her mother would read to her from a book called 'Reliques of Ancient Verse.' Her favorite poem from the 1765 book went like this: 'Ye Highland and Ye Lowlands / Oh where have you been? / They have slain the Earl o'Moray / And laid him on the green.' Wright, however, heard the last line as 'And Lady Mondegreen.'Ī mondegreen actually takes place between auditory perception (the physical act of hearing) and meaning-making (when our brains imbibe the noises with significance). The term was coined in a November 1954 Harper's Bazaar piece, where the author, Sylvia Wright, recalled a childhood mishearing. The word mondegreen is defined as a misheard word or phrase that makes sense in your head, but is, in fact, incorrect.

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