"I mean, what the crap was he even saying there? 'Everybody, now bleed a beetle'? No! Ewww. 'Everybody, law deed will be dull'? Uhhhh, no kidding. 'Everybody, something the feed mill'?"
Mondegreens are the phenomenon of misheard song lyrics. Sometimes it's lack of correct enunciation, sometimes it's the speed or pitch that a lyric is delivered at, but often, a song lyric or recited poem will become famous not for what it says, but for what it sounds like it says to the uncareful ear.
The term "mondegreen" was coined by writer Sylvia Wright in 1954, in an essay she wrote for Harper's Magazine. She wrote:
"When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques. One of my favorite poems began, as I remember: "Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, Oh, where hae ye been? They have slain the Earl Amurray,
The actual line is "And laid him on the green", from the anonymous 17th-century ballad "The Bonnie Earl O'Murray"."
On television, this can happen during commercial jingles, a Theme Tune, or even as the pivotal event in a Three Is Company plot.
It should be noted that a mondegreen is not quite as simple as a mistake or mishearing: they arise from the verified phenomenon that the breaks a listener hears between words often do not actually exist, but are inserted by the listener's mind (this is why you perceive speakers of foreign languages to be speaking fast and running their words together): had Hendrix actually been singing "kiss this guy," rather than "kiss the sky," it might well have sounded exactly the same, and thus is a common mondegreen with such lyrics.
Intentional mondegreens are a staple of filk, parody, comedy and "novelty" songs; for example, the band They Might Be Giants uses several in their songs as a reference to their childhoods in the 1950s and 1960s. "Weird Al" Yankovic is also known for referencing common mis-hearings of popular songs in his lyrics, often in ways which sound almost identical to the original. This is distinct from the more general use of parody lyrics, as the mondegreens are usually common, pre-existing ones which the lyricist is referencing, rather than a complete invention, as a way of playing with the trope.
The German author Axel Hacke has published various entertaining books about mondegreens. (It also mentions some famous English Mondegreens, like "round John Virgin", "Olive the other Reindeer", "Gladly the cross-eyed bear" and of course the Trope Namer.) Dave Barry also included an entire chapter about misheard lyrics in Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs.
There's also the related but distinct Soramimi phenomenon, which is when lyrics in one language sound like actual words and lyrics in another language. Finding soramimi (Japanese, vaguely translating to "tricks of the ears") in songs from other languages is such a popular pastime in Japan that one well-known comedy show devotes a regular segment ("Soramimi Hour") to it. For instance, the refrain of the Scorpions' "You Give Me All I Need" was interpreted as "Yukimi onanii" — "watching the snow fall while pleasuring yourself." A soramimi of "Moskau" by Dschinghis Khan, can be found here.
Several animutations are based around a long series of intentional mondegreens and soramimis, usually involving faux "lyrics" accompanying a confusing (often foreign-language) song. Someone who has read the faked lyrics often has trouble associating the real ones with the song afterwards.
Computer programs that try to understand speech often come up with something like this, from lyrics or just speech, as it's much more difficult for them to distinguish words from each other than to humans. The beta version of the speech-to-text transcriber on YouTube currently works as an automatic Mondegreen generator, often hilariously, when applied to any song there that allows captions.
In July 2008, the 2008 update of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary finally enshrined the word "mondegreen" in its pages. To celebrate this momentous event, Merriam Webster Online began soliciting examples from the public as part of a short-lived publicity campaign. A series of books (and page-a-day calendars) of mondegreens were put together by Gavin Edwards, the first of which is called 'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy and Other Misheard Lyrics.
AmIRight.com has a dominating portion of its site dedicated to showcasing an ever-expanding list of mondegreens, likely including those listed here. Yes, you can even submit your own.
Sometimes caused by bad diction, or bizarrelyrics. The lyrical equivalent of Malaproper. A game on Never Mind The Buzzcocks called "Indecipherable Lyrics" is based on the teams trying to deliberately come up with entire verses' worth of mondegreens for particularly mumbled songs. See also Something Something Leonard Bernstein and Perishing Alt Rock Voice (the latter a common cause of Mondegreens.
See also Lady Mondegreen, which is about something similar happening with character names in other works. A Gag Sub for a music video will probably be filled with those.
Note: Examples below should be In-Universe, or ones referenced in other works ONLY.
Examples:
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A
An unusual example, because it's the band who's singing the wrong lyrics: In Avalon's "All", if you listen carefully, they say "relevation" instead of "revelation".
Even the subtitles are uncertain what the one-lined end credits to Aqua Teen Hunger Force say. Sometimes it's "Dancing is Forbidden", other times it is "Dance Finger Puppets."
The song "Rolling In The Deep" by Adele has the line "Go ahead and sell me out and I'll lay your ship bare." It's begun to be bleeped out because people aren't hearing 'ship' when they're listening.
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never yab to bye, adaaa dada banana boat, and auld lang synnne.
B
"She's my little blue scoop, picks up all of my rocks" ("She's my little Deuce coupe/You don't know what I've got", The Beach Boys, Little Deuce Coupe). Filk artist Tom Smith includes this in Smurfin' Safari, a medley of Smurf-themed Beach Boys parodies.
"Businessmen they drink my wine, ploughmen dig my herb" ("Businessmen they drink my wine, ploughmen dig my earth", Bob Dylan, All Along The Watchtower — reinforced by the fact that numerous covers of the song actually use the mondegreen, though the famous cover by Jimi Hendrix does not.)
In the very next line, the "correct" lyrics to the Hendrix version of this song are a baffling mondegreen of the original words. Where Dylan wrote the somewhat tongue-twisting "none of them along the line know what any of it is worth", Hendrix can be heard to sing the word salad "none will level on the line, nobody of it is worth".
The line Soy un perdedor," from Loser by Beck was called out in a VH-1 special on the best songs of the 90s, where various musicians and critics sang what they thought Beck was saying instead of the Spanish line.
The perfectly sensible "Son can you play me a melody" instead of the actual "Son can you play me a memory" from Billy Joel's Piano Man.*
This one was intentional, though: It's implied to be a Freudian Slip.
The Butthole Surfers' Kuntz consists entirely of samples of a Thai song, focusing mostly on looping a line that sounds like the title. As it turns out, the actual song is about an "itch that won't go away", and the part they keep repeating means "itch". They'd later do something similar with another foreign song (not sure of the language this time) for the unreleased Junkie Jenny In Gaytown.
In the Rifftrax for New Moon, the commentators joke that one of the songs on the soundtrack seems to say "Armed with your staring fly." The song is Roslyn by bon Iver and St. Vincent and the real words are "Aren't we just terrified?"
Joan Baez's cover of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by The Band has a number of Mondregreens, as she learned the song by listening to the recording repeatedly rather than through a lyrics sheet. Notable ones are singing "So much cavalry" instead of "Stoneman's cavalry," and "I took a train to Richmond that fell" in place of "by May the tenth, Richmond had fell." Most of the changes are minor, and none hurt the power of the song at all.
"Blowin' in the Wind": In Salman Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, a character has the magical ability to hear in his mind songs that will become hits three years into the future. But sometimes the lyrics come out garbled. When he heard Bob Dylan's aforementioned song, he thought the chorus went "The ganja my friend is growing in the tin..."
When Bob Dylan offered marijuana to The Beatles for the first time, he was surprised to learn that they hadn't tried it before, as he had misheard the line "I can't hide" in in "I Want to Hold Your Hand" as "I get high". If it weren't for that misunderstanding, the rest of The Beatles' career would have been very different.
The Bangles included a cover of "Sweet and Tender Romance" on their 2011 album Sweetheart of the Sun. Despite having found no official lyrics. Susanna Hoffs remarked, "We listened to the McKinley Sisters' recording over and over again, and could decode most of the words, but in the end we guessed a bit! What you hear on the record is actually our "scratch" vocals, and in fact Vicki and I are singing different words!"
C
A recent ad for Cingular used this: two men are walking down the street and mangling the chorus of "Rock the Casbah" by The Clash. One sings it as "lock the cashbox", only to be briefly stunned when his friend sings it as "stop the catbox". He then agrees with that interpretation
Creedence Clearwater Revival's song "Bad Moon Rising" has the line ".... There's a Bad Moon on the rise" which was sometimes misheard as "... there's a Bathroom on the right". This one is ascended, as the singer really says it that way sometimes.
D
A commercial for T-Mobile plays with this trope: A guy sings along with Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me", and mondegreens it into "Pour some shook-up ramen." His girlfriend is, of course, incredulous, and turns to T-Mobile for help for some reason. In fact, quite a few commercials play with this; one, for Comcast's "On Demand" service, has a man mangling the lyrics to "Born to be Wild" in the shower — and having Mr. T burst through his wall and reprimand him. No, seriously.
"Slow Uncle Walter/The fire engine guy" ("Smoke on the water/Fire in the sky", Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple). The Barenaked Ladies pay homage to this Mondegreen in their song "The Night I Fell Asleep At The Wheel":
Rubberneck traffic and passers-by/ And Slow Motion Walter the fire engine guy / Stand around with their mouths open wide...
In Animal Crackers, Groucho asks Chico to play a song about Montreal: "I'm a dreamer, Montreal." This is a mangled reference to the De Sylva, Brown & Henderson song "Aren't We All?"
"Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly" was once mondegreened in Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo as "Deck Us All with Boston Charlie".
Mondegreened in the television series V by none other than Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund himself.
Willie: Deck the halls with lousy folly/Fa la la la la, la la la la/Tis the evening scruffy molly/Fa la la la la, la la la la/Don't we know how gay a carol/Fa la la, la la la, la la la/Holy moly Yule Tide carol/Fa la la la la, la la...
Family Guy's version on the first Christmas episode ("A Very Special Family Guy Freakin' Christmas"), the lyric was sung by Cleveland and Quagmire as "Deck the balls on Uncle Charlie..." (in syndication, the line is partially muted, so all Cleveland and Quagmire say is "...on Uncle Charlie...")
"You fill out my census" ("You fill up my senses" from "Annie's Song" by John Denver). This common misheard version was naturally seized on by the Capitol Steps for one of their political song parodies.
And skewered by Monty Python's Eric Idle on "John Denver being strangled" ("You came on my pillow...HYUUUNG!)—and yes, Denver sued.
There's also a comedian who bemoans his parents' inability to remember song lyrics, the trump being that his father sings one of Elton John's song as "Don't let your son go down on me".
"Don't bring me down, Bruce!" ("Don't bring me down, groose", which is a made-up word. ELO realized so many people were hearing this that they actually started singing it live.), from Electric Light Orchestra's "Don't Bring Me Down".
Referenced in VH-1's "I Love The 70s Volume 2":
"I just want to know who Bruce is."
Cover artists are divided as to whether the line in Elvis's Peace in the Valley is "the Lamb is the Light" or "the lamp is alight."
F
An entire meme revolves around trying to figure out what "Sugar We're Going Down" by Fall Out Boy is saying. "A loaded black cock that's going and pulling" is a representative line.
"f'in cry" (Stewie's line in the Family Guy theme song, "Laugh and cry"). A clearer version was used in the third season due to censor complaints, but the clearer version has since been dropped ever since the show came back from cancellation.
In The Flight of Dragons, the closed captioning for the official VHS releases frequently substitute the word "horn" for the actual word "hoard".
Many youtube videos parody the first section of Carmina Burana, called Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, based on Mondegreens. Can be found here and here
Green Day's "Know Your Enemy" has an AMV dedicated to the Mondegreen of "Do you know your anime?"
In Dobie Gray's "Drift Away", the line "Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul" is often misheard as "Give me The Beach Boys..."
H/I
The mother of all mondegreens: "Hocus Pocus" as a bogus "magical" formula was originally derived from the latin phrase "hoc est corpus meum" (this is my body) used in the Catholic mass.
Intentional mispronounciation of "Anna Molly" to sound like "Anomaly" by Incubus in the eponymous song.
Doug Ingle's slurred and/or drunk/stoned mispronunciation of "In The Garden of Eden" has likewise become the official title of the famous Iron Butterfly song, "Ina-Gadda-Da-Vida".
"Hey Sandy" by Polaris was the theme tune to The adventures of Pete and Pete, with a famously unintelligible lyric which the band swore they would never reveal. The lyrics have been guessed as everything from "Can you settle to shoot me" to "can you see the shroom babe" and no one is any the wiser.
In the movie The Long Kiss Goodnight, Samuel L. Jackson misquotes England Dan and John Ford Coley's "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight" when he sings, "I'm not talking 'bout the linen," and Geena Davis corrects him that the song is actually saying, "I'm not talking about moving in."
J
One of the more famous mondegreens, as noted above, is "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" ("'Scuse me while I kiss the sky", Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze). Hendrix, aware of the mondegreen, was actually known to pause at this point in the song and either point to or kiss one of his male band members during concerts. In at least a few live recordings, he very clearly says "kiss this guy" or "kiss that guy".
The version of Purple Haze in Guitar Hero World Tour is a live recording and includes the modified line - while he points to a man!
The Archive of Misheard Lyrics, whose website URL comes from this mondegreen, is possibly the biggest archive of mondegreens in existence.
In his final tour in 1988, Frank Zappa did a version of the song, where whoever's singing clearly says, "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy!"
In his stage act, comedian Michael Winslow used to do a version of this song, changing the lyric to "'Scuse me while I kiss this fly", followed by screeches of "Help me! Help me!"
The John Desire cover of Hot Limit by T.M. Revolution has a ton of these, in no small part thanks to the fact that it was originally a Japanese song that was translated into English and sung by an Italian band. The AnimutationWe Drink Ritalin has a collection of Mondegreens from the song. To compare, these are supposed to be the actual lyrics.
Johnny Rivers' "Secret Agent Man" is easily misheard as Secret Asian man, and has been parodied as such at least twice, by the Capitol Steps as well as Da Vinci's Notebook.
K
Greg from Dharma & Greg had a habit of this. "I want to Rock and Roll all night... And part of every day!" Dharma tries to correct him ("...Party every day"), and he drunkenly replies, "If you party every day, how can you get enough rest to Rock and Roll the next night?"
Role Models also referenced this song with, "I like to rock and roll part of every day. I can only rock and roll from three to five."
Kings Of Leon has an intentional aversion/backstory example in Sex on Fire, one of their biggest hits. The Word Salad Lyrics originally featured "Set Us On Fire" as the chorus, but everybody would Mondegreen it as "Sex is on Fire". According to The Other Wiki, one of the sound mixers came in and said, "Sex on fire, huh?" It became a running joke, and eventually the group not only changed the lyrics, but made it the album title track.
L
The Kingsmen's original Louie, Louie is made of these... mostly because nobody could really understand any of the lyrics at all because of the poor recording. Purported lyrics to the song (which were usually dirty) were passed around college campuses, and the FBI (that's the Federal Bureau of Investigations, folks) was eventually called in to unravel the mystery behind Louie, Louie. They couldn't. The FBI pronounced the suspected dirty lyrics "unintelligible at any speed."
Their investigation would have been a lot shorter if they had simply listed to the original which has much clearer vocals.
"I'll get him hard, show him what I've got." ("I'll get him hot, show him what I got," Lady Gaga's "Pokerface.") This is close enough that it wouldn't matter...except when Mika made this mistake, it kind of torpedoed his attempt to neuter the lyrics.
Gaga deliberately invoked the power of Mondegreens in Poker Face. She admitted that the line "Puh-puh-puh-Poker Face puh-puh-poker face" actually says "Puh-puh-puh-Poker Face puh-puh-fuck her face.Only one radio station in the world has caught onto this because she disguised it so well.
Similarly, "Anna Friel, like I just got home..." ("And I feel, like I just got home") in Ray Of Light.
"Wrapped up like a douche" ("Revved up like a deuce" (coupe) in the Manfred Mann's Earth Band version of Springsteen's Blinded By The Light)
The Vacant Lot comedy troupe has a skit dedicated to this song's mondegreens: "ripped up douches"; "loofah sponges" and the "foreman of the night;" and one that's completely incomprehensible.
Made fun of by comedian Louis C.K. who once commented
You know that song 'Blinded by the Light'? Whenever it said 'revved up like a deuce' I always thought it said 'your mother's cunt smells like oranges'. Strange how that works...
Angelica once mondegreened the entire song, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" on an episode of ''Rugrats, something like this: "My country tears of thee, sweet land of lizardy, of thee I see. Land that my father buyed, land of my chill and pie, From every mountain slide, let freedom ring." She also did something similar with "America the Beautiful" on another episode, which started out "O beautiful, for spaceship eyes..."
Later substituting "America, America..." with (what else?) "Angelica, Angelica" And in case that wasn't sufficiently self-centered: "...from me to shining me!"
In Dave Barry's Book of Bad SongsDave Barry has an entire section on mondegreens. Ironically, it's in a different section that he awards the "Certificate of Redundancy Certificate" to Paul McCartney and Wings for the line (from "Live and Let Die"), "But if this ever-changing world in which we live in..." not knowing that the actual line goes, "But if this ever-changing world in which we're livin'..."
This is a particularly infamous misheard lyric. Penn Jillette even joked about Sir Paul's poor grammar in front of a UK audience in Penn & Teller: Fool Us.
N
Nelly Furtado's "Turn Out the Lights" gives us "I licked a bug the other day" (actually "I looked above the other day").
Ne-yo's line in Keri Hilson's "Knock You Down" contains the line "commander in chief of my pimp ship flying high". Many radio stations will bleep out "ship" because it sounds close to another word.
Stevie Nicks gives us an example of an Ascended Trope. The first time she met Tom Petty's wife Jane, Jane said that she and Tom met "at the age of seventeen." However, her thick Southern accent made it sound like "Edge of Seventeen." Nicks liked the sound of it, and wrote a song around it.
Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. When MTV aired the music video, they subtitled lyrics into the video. (Unfortunately, even MTV got the lyrics wrong. It's no wonder why Weird Al's parody pokes fun at the fact the lyrics are nigh-impossible to understand.)
Peanuts once subverted this trope: a story arc has Sally preparing for a Christmas pageant in which "I come out and say, 'Hark!', then Harold Angel starts to sing." Everyone assumes that she's simply confused by the name of the song...until a kid named Harold Angel actually shows up.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 had fun with Pod People "Idiot control! Bees on pot! Burning rubber tires!" The funny thing is some of the ridiculous lines Joel and the bots sang are the real lines. Also, one must remember this is a dub of a Spanish movie so it's bound to have major issues.
Ken Lee ("Can't live [without you]", Without You). Made famous by this clip from the Bulgarian version of Pop Idol.
The children's novel In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson has the protagonist mangling the Pledge of Allegiance on her first day of school in the US:
Shirley: I pledge a lesson to the frog of the United States of America. And to the wee puppet, for witches' hands, one Asian, in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all.
Other people think the Pledge of Allegiance mentions someone named Richard Stands. There was a joke, before the "Under God" line, about a kid saying "One naked individual with liberty and justice for all."
Calvin once began with "I pledge allegiance / to Queen Fragg / and her mighty state of hysteria" and then gets sent to the principal's office.
Histeria!! did a number on this one, with Toast messing up every line. It included the "Richard Stands" mistake and ended, "One naked, undergarments, invisible man, with Liberace and puffed rice for all!"
The Lois Lowry novel All About Sam renders the Pledge of Allegiance as the Pled Jelly-Juntz. Justified as the protagonist is four years old.
In the novel The Prisoner of Pineapple Place, set in an invisible alley of invisible residents, the protagonist believes the words of the Pledge are "One nation, invisible, with liberty and justice for all". The story suggests this might be an intentional Mondegreen on the teacher's part, given the residents' own invisibility.
Folk singer John Prine, in a live version of his song "That's the Way that the World Goes 'Round," mentions a fan who told him she liked the lyrics "It's a happy enchilada, and you think you're gonna drown." Actual lyric: "It's a half an inch of water, and you think you're gonna drown." Rather than correcting the fan, he told her he was glad she liked the words.
"Elephants, Yeah!" ("E di pensier," "La donna é mobile" from Verdi's Rigoletto, as sung by Luciano Pavarotti)
Pink Martini actually recorded a Mondegreen not realizing it was the wrong lyric. In "Amado Mio," a cover of another song, China Forbes sings "I want you ever, I love my darling, wanting to hold you and hold you tight" - and only later did the band realize that the words are "My one endeavor, my love, my darling."
The line "we've got the movement of four dudes, heaven-sent" from the Plastic Constellations' "Let's War" has been misheard as "... four dudes, havin' sex"... which the band is apparently aware enough of to have used this version of the line in concert on at least one occasion.
Q
Subverted by Freddie Mercury of Queen, in "One Vision". You would expect the last line to be "Just gimme, gimme, gimme one vision." which is what the liner notes will say. Instead, as a prank, he sings "Just gimme, gimme, gimme fried chicken", as the band was having fried chicken and tea on a break. They kept the pranked take on a dare from Mercury's boyfriend, Jim Hutton.
R
One of the many possible way to mishear The Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated" is "I Wanna Be a Civilian," which opens up a fascinating alternate interpretation where the song is about a soldier's excitement about being discharged the next day.
Music critic Chuck Eddy has pointed out that REO Speedwagon's Time For Me To Fly can be interpreted as a song about the Protestant Reformation, based on the fact that in the line "I've had enough of the falseness of a worn-out relation", it sure sounds like they're saying "religion" instead of "relation."
In a theatrical parody called Rudolph the Red-Hosed Reindeer about a crossdressing/gay reindeer, the Snowman-narrator sings a song about a woman named "Sylvia Gould" until the Luberjack corrects him that it's supposed to be "Silver and Gold."
Australian punk legends Radio Birdman took their name from a misheard lyric in The Stooges' "1970" - Radio burnin up above...
A particular line in R.E.M.'s "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?" often leads to an inversion of this trope, with radio stations and music channels often broadcasting "don't fuck with me, uh huh" without censorship due to Michael Stipe's vocal delivery. Ironically, when this troper first heard the song, he heard the "fuck" but assumed it was another word that just sounded like "fuck".
The Similou's All This Love inspired a mini fad on YTMND about the famous communist hero, Rainbow Stalin.
The Star-Spangled Banner:
One of Beverly Cleary's Ramona Quimby books had the titular protagonist thinking that the lyrics began "Oh say can you see, by the dawnzer's lee light" and becoming convinced that "dawnzer" must be another word for "lamp."
A Bloom County strip had Opus the penguin mangling it when he finds himself unable to remember the lyrics ("Oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light / what so proudly we snailed, at, um, the starlight's last cleaning...").
John T. Sladek's novel The Müller-Fokker Effect (really!) has the following:
Ofay can you pee
By the dong's surly blight
What you probably inhaled
At the toilet's last cleaning.
There was an article in a 1980s Readers' Digest in which the author recounted how, as a child, she thought that the first line went, "O say can you see, by the daunserly light" and kept "daunserly" as her secret, magical word. She was eventually corrected on this by her family when she decided that it couldn't hurt to share that magical word with her sister who, of course, initially had no idea what she was referring to.
There is an article about illegal immigration, titled "José Can You See".
In Cat Stevens' cover of Eleanor Farjeon's Morning Has Broken, he mispronounces the hyphenated word "re-creation" (the start of which is supposed to sound like "real") as if it were the single word "recreation" (with a start sounding like "wreck"). On the 2008 Deluxe Edition of Teaser and the Firecat, which has both the original and a demo version, the same error can be heard on both.
Shinedown's Second Chance (also known as the Haley's Comet song). As one Radio DJ put it: "Okay, I'm looking at the lyrics sheet, and the lyric is 'she waved', not 'shooting,' stop calling us and asking." The lyric in question is from the bridge - "I just saw Haley's comet, she waved"
Steve Miller Band's "The Joker" has been mondegreened many times, mainly because the actual line, "'cuz I speak of the pompatus of love" uses the Perfectly Cromulent Word "pompatus", which no one who didn't know the song that's the reason people call Miller "Maurice" could parse.
Another example of subtitle mishaps, The Simpsons episode "Moe Baby Blues" when aired on Sky 1 has the line "No means no for Elmo!" subtitled as "A smack in the mouth!"
Another Simpsons subtitling example: in the episode "The Last Temptation of Homer", when Bart (imitating Jerry Lewis) says "My voice is crazy with the spraying already!" after getting his throat sprayed, the subtitles ALWAYS have it as "My voice is crazy with this braying already!"
In Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Greg Proops confuses the title of Sir Mix-a-lot's "Baby got back" with "Ladies got back.
Given all of the YouTubeAMVsusingit asbackgroundmusic, you couldn't be blamed for thinking that Sting's "Desert Rose" was called "I Dream of Red", when in fact the lyric doesn't even appear in the song (the line is "I dream of rain").
One person on Youtube subtitled the Indian song Tunak Tunak Tun with English words that sounded like the original Punjabi lyrics. The results are hysterical. "In your yard I am teh Ferengi man, very odd and chunky!"
In a similar vein to the Hungarian mondegreening of Nightwish's "Kuolema Tekee Taiteilijan" (see above), someone posted the (also Finnish) Timo Rautiainen & Trio Niskalaukaus song "Lintu" with misheard lyrics, which has gems like "kurváim úszkálnak" ("my bitches are swimming") and "Jaj lányom, szülj te buktát!" ("Oh, my daughter, give birth to a sweetroll!")
U
In the comic strip Wild Life, Carson the Muskrat thinks the lyrics to his favorite U2 song are "I still haven't found Walter's cookie jar" (I still haven't found what I'm looking for)
V
A lot of YouTube commenters mistook a line from Voltaire's Vampire Club, "If you really want to see some gore and blood, wait 'til the Ravers come to the Vampire Club" for "If you really want to see some gorram blood, wait 'til the Reavers come to the Vampire Club.
W
"I LIKE SHREDDED WHEAT!!!", the most famous line from the most famous song of the deathcore band Waking the Cadaver... naturally, they didn't come up with it, and its inclusion here should give you a sign that the line isn't even in the song. The actual line has a fair bit of Squick involved, so it won't be replicated here. The "shredded wheat" mondegreen has even become a minor meme, possibly stemming from this video.
Weird Al got the idea for "Like a Surgeon" from Madonna Mondegreening her own song "Like a Virgin" while talking to a friend.
In the TV show Wings one episode's subplot revolved around Antonio becoming a busker in the airport, singing a song he learned back in Italy (his introduction to English): "My Goat Knows the Bowling Score, Hallelujah." After everyone gets sick of him singing the same line over and over they suggest he go on to the next verse, which he does: "Sid's new hair is in the mail, Hallelujah." (That is, "Michael, row the boat ashore" and "Sister, help to trim the sail", respectively.)
According to a radio DJ, "Mull of Kintyre" by Wings was the song title he most heard mangled by people phoning in to request. "Mulligan's Tyre" was the most common but there were other variants.
Many of the songs played as the entrances for WWE wrestlers is misheard. A current meme is that of Sheamus, whose entrance contain the line "Too many lies, too many lies," which is often misheard as "too many limes, too many limes" or "two men in lines, two men in lines" because of the singer's accent. Also, the line "lost your head" is misheard as "lobster head," fitting perfectly with Sheamus's bright, glowing red hair.
...is listed in the Chalkhills FAQ. Because so many folks wonder why they hear Andy singing most of the words...but instead of "smoke," they hear Colin whispering "fuck"
One Perplex City card is based on identifying these.
Computers
Often comes up in relation to computer speech recognition software. Some Apple programmers had T-shirts saying "I helped Apple wreck a nice beach" (Recognize speech).
Parodied by a team of MIT researchers, who published a paper on how to use "common sense" word association to correct these errors. They intentionally titled their paper "How to Wreck a Nice Beach You Sing Calm Incense" (translation: "How to Recognize Speech Using Common Sense").
Charlie Brooker once wrote about his speech recognition software repeatedly inserting the phrase "offer fox ache" into documents.
When Scott was reading Twas the Night Before Christmas to his son in The Santa Clause, his son mistakes "arose such a clatter" for "a Rose Suchak ladder". This turns out to be justified.
In Life of Brian, Brian and his mother are listening to Jesus' Sermon of the Mount from way in the back row, prompting Brian's mother to ask, "Did he say, 'Blessed are the Cheesemakers'?"
Winnie the Pooh 2011: Pooh and his friends thought that Christopher Robin was kidnapped by a monster known as the Backson because Pooh actually mistranslated Christopher's message "I'll be back soon."
In Flushed Away, Roddy protests to the thugs looking for Rita that he's just an innocent bystander. They now think that Roddy's name is Millicent Bystander.
An in-universe mondegreen names the book Snot Stew: it comes from the kitten protagonists mishearing the human children arguing: "Is not!" "Is too!" becomes "S'not!" "S'tew!"
A Monk Swimming by Malachy McCourt (a memoir of growing up in Ireland and moving to America) uses a mondegreen from the prayer "Hail Mary" - "blessed art thou amongst women".
Novelization of Revenge of the Sith has this dialogue between Gunray and Anakin:
Gunray: Palpatine promised to leave us in peace!
Lord Vader: The transmission was garbled. He promised to leave you in pieces
In Warrior Cats Crookedstar's Promise, barn cat Fleck thinks that the moonstone (a place where warriors communicate with their ancestors) is the foodstone. Prompts the hilarious line "Is there a foodstone as well as a moonstone?"
The title The Catcher in the Rye comes from an in-universe Mondegreen, Holden mishears the song "Comin' Thru the Rye" and adopts this mistaken phrase as his future purpose in life, forming a mental image of himself catching kids who are running around in a rye field (which is inexplicably placed on "some crazy cliff," which to him is symbolic of protecting them from adult themes, especially sex. The song is actually, very ironically, about two lovers meeting to have sex in a rye field.
The Australian TV show Comedy Inc. has fun with this trope in their stop-motion vignette series Ernest the Engine and Others where the character Stevie the Steam Train tends to "stutter badly at the most inappropriate of times", such as when he sings the song "Country Roads".
The main character of Victorious mistook the ''The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" theme song lyric "shooting some b-ball outside the school" as "chewing some meatballs outside the school."
In Small Steps, Armpit mishears the words "I'm but" as "Armpit".
"Does he have it?" Is that what they're singing? "Does he have it?" Then you think to yourself "Why have I been singing 'Monkey hatchet?'" How many people have heard me sing "Monkey hatchet?" Then there are some songs that you don't even bother learning the words, because you assume that no one knows the words. That Aretha Franklin song "Respect," that's been around a long time, and we always get to that part where "R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me. R-E-S-P-E-C-T, ({beat}) coch-C-T HO!"
When the Super Smash Bros. Brawl theme song came out, Masahiro Sakurai made certain to point out that the lyrics were Latin, to avoid inevitable misinterpretation of the lyrics. Not that it worked though. Search Youtube and be prepared for surprisingly funny results like "Call me papa! Me Who? So it wasn't me! And I flee a tsunami!"
In an episode of Red vs. Blue, an exhausted and desperate Donut tries to deliver the important and cryptic message "It's under the sand" to Caboose, but because Donut is on the verge of passing out, his words come out as "It's under....thessssssand". Caboose hears it as "It's under this, and...", and Hilarity Ensues.
CRISWELL PREDICTS: Regained my friend! We're all interested in the future of all that is why you and I am I going to spend our restaurant. And remember my friend: future events such as the well thank you. You are interested in %uh no the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. Handout for the first time, we are bringing to you %uh post story of what happened fateful day. We are giving you all the evidence based only on a secret testimony problem visible souls who survived this terrifying ordeal: the incident, the places. My friend we cannot keep it a secret any longer! Let us twenty three guilty. Let s reward the innocent. My friend... can your heart stand but shopping faq about grave robbers from outer space?
Andrew Mathas purposely mondegreens songs to make humorous videos.
And then there's this little gem "Songs Of Praise with subtitles".
ThisYouTube Poop mondegreens a line from Toy Story. (In case you're wondering, they're actually saying "gangway", as in "clear the way" or more bluntly "get out of the way".)
Here we find out that the Gamecube Wavebird controller has "fudge brownies" inside.
Sheamus will rip off your head and fuck your girlfriend.
Slowbeef of Retsupurae once made a video called "A Public Service Announcement to all Lets Players" wherein he attempted to read American Gods by Neil Gaiman whilst ZoopSoul LPedI Wanna Be the Guy. Everytime ZoopSoul dies, Slowbeef interrupts himself and says "Please Stop Lets Playing I Wanna Be The Guy." At one point he gets to the part where Shadow "was (secondly) going to towel himself off" and ZoopSoul ends up dying at that moment. It is commonly misheard as "Second he was going to tell himself, Please Stop Lets Playing I Wanna Be The Guy." In reality it's, "Second he was going to towel himself - Please Stop Lets Playing I Wanna Be The Guy."
"Old Long Johnson" the cat. "Oh, Don Piano. Why do I despise you all the live long day?"
Legion Of Superheroes had one with the captions for the hearing impaired. Apparently "Kem the Bizmollian" (a reference to Tenzil Kem, aka MatterEaterLad, from the planet Bizmol) came out in the captions as "Camden Bizmollian".
A VHS tape containing the Disney short "Clock Cleaners" was banned from Wal-Mart in the 1990s because Reverend Donald Wildmon thought that Donald Duck shouts "Fuck you!" during his argument with the main clock spring in that short (he really shouts "Says you!"). To avoid this controversy, most DVD releases of the short dub over the seemingly offending line with audio of Donald saying "Aww, nuts!", despite it not making sense in the context of the argument. However, the recent Disney Channel broadcasts of the short have the original line reinstated.
Speaking of Donald Duck, this song is the Finnish theme of Ducktales. Thanks to YTMND, it is heard quite ... differently now.
The Christmas short Olive The Other Reindeer has this set off the plot. Upon hearing on the radio that one of Santa's reindeer is injured and that they'll be counting on "all of the other reindeer," Olive decides that Santa did not say this, but the title, and that she is not a dog at all, and that she is in fact, a reindeer. So she goes to the north pole to prove it.
A bus driver later tells Olive that he used to think the pledge of Allegence was about him, Richard Stands. As in, "And to the Republic, for Richard Stands."
Stephen Pinker, the famous scientist of MIT, reported in The Language Instinct that these are extremely common in childhood and virtually all children commit quite a few of them when learning language. Language is actually quite a feat to parse into distinct words (which has confounded computers for ages now, and explains why people speaking foreign languages seem to talk very fast: if you know a language, your mind adds the gaps and picks out the words). He gave many examples - one from the Lord's Prayer was "Harold be thy name." (Hallowed be thy name.)
CAPD sufferers experience this more often than most people do, due to the nature of the condition itself. A lot of times (especially in wide-open populated areas like a department store), a song playing on a radio will either be filled with Mondegreens or Something Something Leonard Bernstein. Also, Mondegreens are occasionally present in normal speech in the ears of a CAPD-suffering listener.
Joan of Arc's name is a major example. Her actual name, Jeanne Darc (Joan Darc), was misunderstood as Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc). In fact, there is no such place as Arc, certainly none associated with the life of the French heroine.
Several books by Gavin Edwards (before the Internet made reading and sharing mondegreens easy), in the 1990's are collections of these sent in by readers: 'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy, He's Got The Whole World in his Pants, When a Man Loves a Walnut, and Deck the Halls with Buddy Holly.
