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Sylvia's Mondegreen

(posted by Gus McCaig on February 27, 2010 at 11:34:06)

Message:

Mike, I hope you haven't spoiled it for Sheri Lloyd (who methinks is new to the Community). She may have been far happier with all the sweet cream icing flowing down.

Gus


NOTE: Mondegreen = a misheard lyric.
Etymology ... The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term mondegreen in her essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," which was published in “Harper's Magazine” in November 1954. In the essay, Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the final line of the first stanza from the seventeenth century ballad “The Bonnie Earl O' Murray”. When she was a child, her mother used to read aloud to her from “Percy's Reliques” and one of her favourite poems began, as she remembered:

>>Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
>>Oh, where hae ye been?
>>They hae slain the Earl O' Moray,
>>And Lady Mondegreen

They had, of course, slain only the Earl an' no' his woman, but had laid him on the green (no' the cream).

.

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