Talk:Mondegreen/Archive 1

message: How would you define the following case produced my toddler daughter? Her first ever tale written (actually typed on my PC) all by herself started with "1-sap on a time 1 eeg say peeep-peep-pep".
The "1-sap on a time" part renders exactly what was intended, i.e., "Once upon a time". It is not a rebus, is it? The game play was not intentional. I'd hesitate to call a typo either, at least not a trivial illiterate one, but rather kind of "infinite-resource-and-sagacity" IMO (Of course, it was MY daughter :-).
mikkalai 21 Nov 2003 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mikkalai (talk • contribs) 20:51, 21 November 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: How to define case

message: Isn't "The Sky is Crying" by Albert King? I know it was probably done before that, but I'm pretty sure that song isn't Stevie Ray Vaughan's. --Domukaz, 7/17/05  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.61.86.218 (talk • contribs) 16:11, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The Sky Is Crying is by Elmore James, and Big Yello Taxi is by Joni Mitchell. I'll fix that now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.68.41.20 (talk • contribs) 00:43, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Song question

message: I restored some material that had been added by an anonymous user and reverted (and I edited it some), as it was highly relevant and mostly substantiated. If you're considering deleting it, please tell me why here or at my Talk page. Thanks. (Full disclosure: I "cyber-know" the person who added it.) —JerryFriedman 21:33, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stuff on Sylvia Wright and Jon Carroll 

message: I am afraid this page starts to accumulate "original research" that plague numerous word/slang/phrase lists in wikipedia. Time to apply the general wikipedia's "notability" criterion and disallow additions of non-published examples. Are you with me? mikka (t) 00:35, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I remember "The piece of cod which passeth all understanding" from the satirical Nigel Molesworth books, nothing about a pop song. I also can't help wondering if "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" was really a mishearing. The page for Jimi Hendrix mentions a story he faked being gay to get out of military service. --GwydionM 17:30, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Cleanup

message: Are Bart Simpson's prank phone calls mondegreens ? Jay 06:04, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I'd say so, though in reverse of usual "mishearing". Maybe there should be a subsection for them here? --ILike2BeAnonymous 20:43, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I posted a question on the Talk:Bart Simpson page to find out if anyone there knows if this phenomenon (mondegreens deliberately forced on the listener, as it were) has its own name. Lawikitejana 17:30, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Bart's prank calls

message: A classic example was missing "You and me and Leslie", so I added it. When searching for the song title and such I found this link which indicates some sort of ordering, which matches some of the other articles I've read in the past. So, I put the top three at the top of the list. (I'm bothering to explain because I agree that random examples should not be added) Ingrid 03:35, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why I reordered and added 

message: I think Manfred Mann's "Blinded By the Light" should be readded to the list, mainly because its chorus is one of the most popularly misheard lyrics of any songs in recent history. As a matter of fact, I would say it deserves a small section to itself, based its many popular misinterpretations, not to mention the many references to it in pop culture: Conan O'Brien even did a "bit" where he goes to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and asks the clerk at the "Information Desk" what the correct lyrics are, and The Vacant Lot did an entire sketch around four guys sitting around arguing four different interpretations of the lyric. Also, I haven't checked, but I'm sure there are some websites out there about it too. What do you think? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wavy G (talk • contribs) 20:15, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I dunno; why not put it in and see how it flies? --ILike2BeAnonymous 00:11, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Roger, Captain! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wavy G (talk • contribs) 21:57, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Blinded by the Light 

message: I changed "Jose can you see, by the dawn's early light?" to "Jose can you see, by the donzerly light?" as.. well.. I always heard "donderly light" when I was younger. When I searched for "donderly light" on Google, it recommended "donzerly light", so I thought I would use that instead. More hits on that phrase. --AshyRaccoon Talk Edits 08:14, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Isn't that what Ruthie from 7th Heaven thought it was in one of the earlier episodes? I'm pretty sure that she kept bugging Simon to teach her the words and then couldn't pronounce them right or something. FruitMart07 20:04, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Donzerly light 

message: The article says, 'Quite a few mondegreens may be seen in captioned live television broadcasting of impromptu speeches, interviews, etc. (one local news report of a "grand parade" was captioned as a "Grandpa raid").'
To my knowledge, all live captioning is done with the aid of computer software. The captionist types on a special keyboard optimised for typing phonics quickly, and the computer transliterates these into text in consultation with a spell checker. Often it is obvious that an absurd combination of words in live captioning has arisen from a simple 'typographical' error: the captionist chose slightly the wrong phonic(s) to represent words to the software, and/or the captionist accidentally selected the wrong option from a pick list of potential transliterations. Also, at times the speech does not resolve unambiguously to words until very late in a sentence or until even later, after appropriate context makes clear what the speaker said. The captionist cannot afford to get very far behind. People accustomed to following captions allow for these exigencies and simply read through them, "hearing" only the sounds and then "rehearing" them as the original words. One significant shortcoming responsible for many mistransliterations is insufficient seeding (or no seeding at all) of the spell checker with jargon or uncommon proper nouns (heh heh) reasonably expected to be present. The captionist may have no idea how to spell an odd term or name, or may have every idea but no time in which to do it. It should have been present in advance and come to the top of the pick list.
Do these scenarios qualify as mondegreens? Most of them would be corrected in very short order by the captionist if the performance were anything but live, so there is not so much a mishearing as a hasty misrepresentation. Further, in the future we can expect software to become more sophisticated at the task, to the eventuality of supplanting human operators. We can expect no such improvement in humans. Does this constitute a distinction?
Should the article be amended to explain the human/software/exigent interplay?
Of course, it is very annoying when it is simply clear that the wrong captionist was assigned to the job, and true mondegreens come straight from the captionist's mind at an alarming rate.  Christian Campbell 03:49, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's interesing. I think it should have a mention. Wavy G 11:42, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've now attempted an explanation of the reasons behind mondegreens in captioning, with an attempt to cover all the sources of error you mentioned (other than the fact that some captionists are just bad, which I think is implied in the explanation but needn't be said). See what you think. Lawikitejana 21:07, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  False mondegreens in captions? 

message: "A wean in a manger ("Away in a Manger" using the Scottish word for a baby)" has "scottish" wiki-linked to "Scottish Gaelic language". Isn't it more likely "wean" derives from Scots, and the word is cognate to the English verb "to wean"? --Krsont 00:43, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: According to the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, "wean" is indeed Scots and derives from "wee ane" (ane=one). I fixed it. —JerryFriedman 21:37, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  er... gaelic? 

message: Editors should 1) be native speakers of English 2) not remove examples on subjective grounds (including weakly objective grounds) 3) not make judgements on unheard examples 4) if in doubt, leave examples in. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pliny (talk • contribs) 23:38, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with (1), (2) is a toss-up; concerning (3) and (4), I disagree completely. The "examples" section becomes a dumping ground for every possible misunderstood or misheard lyric or line of any kind, regardless of how far-fetched, without constant judicious editing. That, after all, is the role of an editor, to decide what stays and what goes. If you don't believe me, just put this article on your watchlist and observe it over a week or two's time. ==02:56, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Look, I appreciate the effort, but could you explain the recent multiple removals? At first I even thought the page was vandalized. For example. why did you remove the "kinky turtle"? Google shows several references to it which may or may not be independent but are definitely not out of line. Please reconsider. Cema 04:01, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Did I remove that? I don't think so—at least I didn't intend to. It probably went with a reversion, since someone really fucked up the order of things here recently. I actually like that example. I'll put it back in. ==ILike2BeAnonymous 04:28, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks! Cema 12:42, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Editors

message: This article is chock-o-block with examples, is badly structured, and appears to have very little in the way of citations. I'll be giving it a big trim sometime soon. Just to make it clear that it wasn't an "accident" last time. - brenneman {L} 05:08, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh...woah. Sorry, I just assumed such a massive clearing had to be a mistake. Hey, listen: How about giving the editors time to cite their examples (if possible) and restructure the awkward parts before deleting again. I'm sure they could find examples of the good ones easily enough. You could always tag it before wiping out possibly good information. Thanks, Wavy G 05:37, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Err, no, I'm sorry. No reason for the nasty-gram I delivered there. The problem with lists of examples in articles is that they tend to be added to indiscriminantly. I'll make a decent stab at re-structuring, but I'll move anything I take out here for consideration. I'll also cut back on number of bitch-flakes I have in the morning. - brenneman {L} 06:59, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Not a problem. I understand the concern of articles with long lists of crufty examples, but I know this article is heavily monitored by its contributors, and original research examples are constantly being removed (I am not a main contributor, but it is on my watchlist, so I see this a lot). I'm sure many of these examples listed are legit and can be cited, or they would have been removed before. (And hey, it could be worse: someone could have pissed in your bitch-flakes) Wavy G 04:35, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Trim 

message: Another joke is about the 1894 hymn Keep Thou My Way with the lyrics "Gladly, the cross I'd bear," popularly misheard as "Gladly, the cross-eyed bear." – it's not really mishearing, is it, since the two phrases sound identical? Misunderstanding perhaps. 84.70.149.216 11:00, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, you’re quite right.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.59.113.69 (talk • contribs) 22:22, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Wait, not so fast, Mr. (or Ms.) Unsigned; I thought the same thing at first, but it actually is a mishearing. Think about it: what was intended was "I'd", when what was heard was "-eyed". The same sound, homophonically speaking, yes, but a mishearing nonetheless. +ILike2BeAnonymous 01:44, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  I'm going to be really pedantic... 

message: For one, there is a book of misheard lyrics titled "Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy." And (I don't know how to cite something like this, but nonetheless) I know there is an old Kevin James comedy routine where he refernces the "Hold Me closer Tony Danza" and "The girl with colitis goes by." Just thought I'd throw those out there, for the whoever it was saying they were original research. Wavy G 02:52, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The issue is notability. Once again, I myself can invent much more. Wikipedia is not WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, ie, not a collection of quotations of jokes, puns, idiotisms, and other indiscriminate text. How do I know the 'green was not invented yesterday by smart anon? Original research, personal essay or wit, whatever. For the piurpose of encyclopedia 2-3 examples is enough. If you want more of them, please give the reason why they must be here. If you know a Kevin James comedy, you are welcome to provide a reference. mikka (t) 03:38-03:43, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, heh, sadly, I cannot. I'm just saying I have heard them "elsewhere." Love, Wavy G 04:29, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Backing up the so-called "unsourced" examples... 

message: Force Kin Troubleshooter 18:09, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Force Kin 

message: I've tried to add a footnote about "there's a bathroom on the right." When I preview it, no problem, but when I actually save it, something gets screwed up. After my addition, the footnotes for the page should look something like
:1 ^ a b original Jon Carroll footnote
:2 ^ my new bathroom footnote
:3 ^ Joni Mitchell footnote
...and this is how it shows up in the preview. But once I save it, it shows up as
:1 ^ a b c d original Jon Carroll footnote
:2 ^ my new bathroom footnote
:3 ^ Joni Mitchell footnote
:4 ^ bathroom footnote again
:5 ^ Mitchell footnote again
I can think of another way to include this material as a workaround, but if it's a previously unknown bug I thought maybe someone should be informed (and how is that done?) so they can take a whack at fixing it. The other possibility, of course, is that I've screwed up my markup for the footnotes. I've unfortunately littered the article history with attempts to make the existing and new footnote markup match WP:FOOT, esp. section 1.2, to no avail. Anyone? --NapoliRoma 23:49, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The footnotes now seem to be displaying as expected, so if there was a bug in the Wikipedia code it's been fixed, or more recent edits to the article have made the bug go dormant again... --NapoliRoma 22:19, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Footnote madness -- bug or PEBKAC? 

message: This is (at least purported to be) a common mishearing of "cystic fibrosis" by children. Does it qualify as a mondegreen? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mattiwos99 (talk • contribs) 18:15, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Sixty-five roses" 

message: Let's talk about "Can't Buy Me Love" translating to "Throw a crowbar to the woman." As fantastic as I think that is, AltaVista's Babelfish program tells me that "кинь бабе лом" actually translates to "kin' to ram the scrap" and "throw a crowbar to the woman" is "Бросьте лом к женщине". Mind you, Babelfish isn't the world's best translator, but this seems disparate to a level of suspician. -Litefantastic 20:34, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I say we give it a week for someone with Russian expertise to confirm or not, after which we should just remove it if it remains unverified. +ILike2BeAnonymous 21:21, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You have a 'pedian in mind? -Litefantastic 22:22, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Nope; I can read Cyrillic, but that's about it. Any way to send up a "distress signal" to get someone to look at this? +ILike2BeAnonymous 05:28, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: We go through the babel userboxes. -Litefantastic 00:23, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Throw a crowbar to the woman

message: A popular joke has a child being asked what God's first name is, and he replies, "Andy." He gets this name from the hymn "In The Garden" (also known as "I Come To The Garden Alone"): "Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me, Andy tells me I am his own..." as opposed to, "And He walks with me..."
So if God's begotten Son is Jesus Christ, does that make God the Andy Christ? --Damian Yerrick (☎) 03:23, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yuk yuk —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 192.154.65.1 (talk) 10:13, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Andy Christ? 

message: I commented out the external link in-line with this because it is not a reliable source. Do we have another citation for this?  brenneman {L} 11:31, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've reverted since there was a discussion thread here and it's not appropiate to debate using edit summaries. The source is a introductory aside to a paper, and does not itself provide any provenance. While the author may certainly be considered a reliable sorce in some settings, this does not by extension make everything that they say reliable. - brenneman {L} 23:45, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  wreck a nice beach 

message: "Soramimi" is not in many standard English dictionaries. Obscurity, non-reproducibility of Japanese orthography, and consistency (why only Japanese?) are arguments against merger. Thomasmeeks 12:45, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with Thomasmeeks, but for another reason. A Mondegreen is a result of an accidental misunderstanding, while a Soramimi is an intentional reworking of a line, to sound like the original. These are quite different. People who "coin" (for lack of a better term) a Mondegreen have no idea they have done so, while those who make a Soramimi do so quite intentionally. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.45.62.221 (talk • contribs) 20:27, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "No" for merge with Soramimi 

message: WP:OR forbids me from adding to "A wean in a manger"...."The little lord Jesus laid down his wee ted". Oh well. If only I was notable. Camillus (talk) 21:44, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Original research

message: In The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams, Woolfardishworthy is defined as:
A mumbled, mispronounced or misheard word in a song, speech or play. Derived from the well-known mumbles passage in Hamlet
This doesn't merit a page of its own, and I'm not sure it is even a word (but The Meaning of Liff is a dictionary of sorts, and the authors are well known), but is it a synonym or a superset of mondegreen, and is it appropriate to mention its existence at some point in this article? --JBel 03:02, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Don't think so; the article describes this work as "a 'dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet'; all the words listed are place names, and describe common feelings and objects for which there is no current English word.". Interesting, though. +ILike2BeAnonymous 05:53, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Woolfardishworthy

message: I once had a friend who had a trove of mondegreen-type stories. The only one I remember began like this: "When sip honor dime, dare wassail it'll curl whores gnome nose Colt Deluxe" (Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was known as Goldilocks). There must be a source of these somewhere on the internet, but I have no idea what search term to use - does anyone know what name is given to this type of story or where it could be found? Denni talk 00:46, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Colt Deluxe 

message: ;Deletion protocol
I just re-added three examples that were deleted from the mondegreen page. I put back Paul Simon, AC/DC and John Brown. They all had a chance to be reverted (though the later two came with editing so I can see the issue there), and they weren't. And, really, if you're going to delete content, especially content that other people have passed over deleting, then you have to let people know. You have to actually write an edit summary. Not does it take longer for people to notice content is missing, but it took me forever to find out where it was deleted and what had happened.
Obviously, not every example is important and we need people to delete the stuff that isn't. But be polite. Say why. Or at least leave an edit summary so it doesn't take me 20 minutes to find out when something was deleted.
;Catcher in the Rye
If you haven't read Catcher in the Rye...SPOILERS! Skip this section unless you've read it or just don't care.
If we're going to have Catcher in the Rye as an example, I think a little more needs to be said then, "The novel title "Catcher in the Rye" is explained by the narrator as being a mondegreen."
Does in actually have a place on this page...maybe. Catcher in the Rye isn't really a mondegreen. The character didn't mishear a phrase--he misremembered it...which is really different.
The poem is "When a body meet a body, comin' thro' the rye,”, not, “catch a body” The Holden doesn't mishear it--he misremembers it and creates something around his misrememberance. Now I suppose it could go on this page--but we'd need something more--this isn't as straightforward as other examples and either way, all of the examples have more than what we have now for Catcher in the Rye. We at least have the mondegreen and the actual line for all of the examples and we don't have anything for this. At the moment, the article simply states that the narrator explains that it's a mondegreen. The article doesn't say that the title is a mondegreen or anything else. It's just odd.
Now, the title and Holden's mishearing is covered in Wikipedia's "Catcher in the Rye" article, so maybe we could link to that specific point or something, but I just think that we should take this out.
:::This has already been taken out, but just in case this comes up again, I went and read the section. The book never refers to the mistaken phrase as a mondegreen. However you want to classify it, Holden misremembering, the little boy misremembering and Holden going off of that--whatever, it's not a Mondegreen and the book doesn't mistakenly call it a Mondegreen, so it has no place here. TStein 09:14, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deletion protocol / Catcher in the Rye / British v. American puncuation 

message: I have come across this as a mondegreen in one of Gavin Edwards' misheard lyrics books, so I figured that this was a good example to put here. I know of a lot of interesting ones (including "The Reverend Blue Jeans" for Neil Diamond's song "Forever in Blue Jeans"), but I decided to pick one that made its way into another medium, so that's why I picked this one (the other medium being a commercial I heard on the radio). I am peeved that someone made an executive decision to remove this, as a result of this person's opinion that it is more of a joke than a misheard lyric. I beg to differ. I have all of the Gavin Edwards misheard lyrics books, and when I find some time, I will look this one up in the three non-Christmas books. Once I find it, I will repost it here with the citation from the book, thus affirming it as a misheard lyrics. In other words, once I have found it, I'll never let it go. RSLitman 21:08, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: As I explained on your discussion page, this is a malapropism (sort of, but close enough), not a mondegreen, mainly because it's an intentional mangling, not an accidental mishearing. As they say, close, but no cigar. +ILike2BeAnonymous 21:17, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Sam and Janet Evening" 

message: What about the well known YTMND fad involving interpretations of misheard lyrics? 70.106.36.134 14:07, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The wiki article doesn't say anything about misheard lyrics. What are you referring to? TStein 10:08, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dew 

message: The Skids' Into the Valley has a number of misheard lyrics, the most common being "Barman, a soda!" instead of "Boy, man and soldier"
Why is this removed? This wasn't just in the Maxell commercial, I remember it (and others) from much before that. It is referenced in the website http://www.amiright.com/artists/skids.shtml with different lyrics to the commercial. In fact the commercial uses "Barman and Soda"
Maxell also used the Desmond Dekker Israelites example - why wasn't this removed as well? Tim Fellows 03:15, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Into the Valley 

message: From reading the article, most examples given are of misheard lyrics, rather than other mishearings.  That must tell us something about the way some people sing, and how others listen.  But the definition which opens the article seems to drafted so as to not limit the concept of mondegreens to lyrics.
The Australian National Anthem is a source of amusement for several reasons.  A mondegreen that has recently received a lot of publicity in Australia, because it is discussed by the title-character in the popular movie "Kenny" (2006), comes from the opening line:  "Australians all, let us rejoice, for we are young and free, ..." which the fictional character Kenny misheard as: "Australians all, let us ring Joyce, for she is young and free, ...".  This is more credible than the "four minus one" example, already deleted.
Second example, non-lyrical, was used in a television advertisement for Telstra Australia, circa 1980.  My father-in-law, who had been a soldier in WW2 told me that the words were used in training to emphasize the importance of clarity in communication.
The message given by an Army officer to a runner is:  "Send reinforcements; we're going to advance."  When the runner gets to headquarters, he repeats his message: "Send three-and-fourpence*; we're going to a dance." (*= three shillings and fourpence, about half of a day's pay for a soldier at the time). Pmthomas 12:20, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  an observation and two examples 

message: what about black sabbaths "I tell you all to enjoy life", in the song 'paranoid'?
every time i listen to it i hear "I tell you all to end your life". which would probably be the biggest heavy metal steriotype· Lygophile has spoken 13:09, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm fairly (not 100%) sure that this mondegreen was reproduced when Megadeth covered the song for the Nativity In Black tribute. Well, it sounds more like Dave is singing 'end your life' than 'enjoy life' to me. Megadeth also had another infamous bit of lyrical license on their cover of Anarchy in the U.K., though Dave says he 'made up the words he couldn't figure out'. Not sure how that fits in here. PolarisSLBM 14:31, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: end your life

message: There have been several unofficial 'music videos' for the song Wishmaster by the band Nightwish, showing images of words which are not the lyrics to said song, but could be misheard to be, in several places, such as Google video or Youtube. Do these videos deserve a mention? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 160.36.119.134 (talk) 04:06, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No, no, no, no, no! The article is already continually getting swamped with bad examples and contrived mondegreens. If you run across a bona fide mishearing, something of the caliber of "bathroom on the right", then add it. +ILike2BeAnonymous 06:05, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wishmaster 

message: What about the fast food chain Arby's.  Is 'Arby' considered a mondegreen of 'R.B.', the initials of Roast Beef?  --Mainstreetmark 16:05, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Think for a second about your question: it's not a mishearing of a word or phrase, now, is it? It's just a spelling out of letters, so no, not a mondegreen. (Like the use of the term "wye" for something shaped like the letter "Y".) +ILike2BeAnonymous 17:38, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  "Mairzy doats" (the literal song lyric) is an intentional mondegreen of "Mares Eat Oats" just as "Arby" is one for "R. B."  I'm prepared to accept that I'm wrong - it's just a thought.  --Mainstreetmark 18:33, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arby's roast beef? 

message: Perhaps the should be a section that lists Mondegreens that have been used on TV, films etc. Do you under stand what I MJN SEIFER 19:42, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Mondegreens in fiction

message: Fat Man, do not remove sourced items. And justify your proposed wholesale changes here before you go ahead. You must discuss with other editors. 62.64.213.138 (talk) 16:31, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Which sourced items did I remove?  And more importantly, why did you restore all the unsourced items?--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back (talk) 06:38, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Third Party Opinion -- Initiated
Truth be told, "Friends, the TV show" is a poor citation.  It's not a poor references, but without an episode name, it's a poor ciation of what may perhaps be a good reference.  With all that is in Wikiedia without any reference at all, it's surprising that there are some who will remove uncontroversial things (without reference, or proper reference) without initially marking it as verification needed or something along those lines.  Let's not become too pedantic over this. DRosenbach (Talk | Contribs) 04:25, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

text: Yes, reference to a tv episode is a source. The information doesn't have to have been sucked into a book first. That said the citation should be more specific. And editors should be given the chance to improve the citation first. 62.64.208.209 (talk) 12:18, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Some of the references are still lousy; but you're right that this is relatively easy to fix, if someone spends some time.  Perhaps the greater problem is that the pop culture reference currently overwhelms the article, a problem that only gets worse as the.  For now, I'm going to weed out a few examples with egregiously lacking or misleading references, but utlimately I'd like to drastically prune or eliminate the "Examples" section altogether (I won't do this myself, until we generate consensus on the matter). Any especially complleing examples can be incorporated into the main body of the text, IMO.--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back (talk) 01:22, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Fat Man, Discuss

message: :: * An popular parody of a Polish black metal band Behemoth can be found on YouTube[2]. It sports mixed Polish-English mishearings, accompanied by a subtitled edit of the original music video that perfectly parodies the dark and heavy atmosphere of the original song.
This reads as an advertisement.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.80.43.25 (talk) 00:01, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: In Music

message: Under the heading "External links," it says that Richie Valens' song "La Bamba" was "flasly translated to English." I have read four Berlitz self-teacher books and never found the word "flasly." It isn't in my Webster's Dictionary either. What does it mean? And it's certainly no mondegreen... Dougie monty (talk) 18:00, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I wonder if it's a combo typo-misspelling of "falsely"?Lawikitejana (talk) 00:46, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: New word coined in Berlitz reference!

message: Some nice guy removed my entry, which was about a mondegreen in this movie. Since this is a page about mondegreens, I can't understand why it was removed. I know that everybody can edit Wikipedia, but I think it's good education to contact the author first.--Gspinoza (talk) 13:45, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, the answer to that is right there on the edit page itself, the warning "If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it.". So no, most edits don't require the editor to seek permission to change existing text. (In the case of a substantial change involving a significant amount of text, or one that significantly changes the meaning of an article, then yes, it's a good thing to hash things out on a discussion page first.) Basically, the item you added was not a good example, compared to most of the ones in the article. And yes, there is still a good deal of flotsam and jetsam in the article that needs to be weeded out, so don't feel as if you're being singled out here. +ILike2BeAnonymous (talk) 19:15, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe it was not a good example for you. But you are not the whole world. --Gspinoza (talk) 15:33, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that if you want to wait for others to comment, you'll find that most other editors here would agree with me. +ILike2BeAnonymous (talk) 19:09, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

text: i concur.99.153.29.112 (talk) 13:38, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Close Encounters of the third kind

message: A fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees, upon first hearing the latest single, was convinced that Siouxsie was extolling the listener to "EeAAAaaaaaaaat cat poo"! (Peek-a-Boo (song)). Sadly, even without WP:EL spoiling things, the website got taken down a few years ago... LessHeard vanU (talk) 22:27, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  True (but unverifiable) 

message: My objection to your repeated attempts to include fried chicken information are based on this portion of the Wikipedia policy of No Original Research. I will give you another day to come up with a source that makes the analysis before I revert it, but I am going to tag it now. TheRedPenOfDoom (talk) 18:37, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unsourced Original Research about fried chicken 

message: yow know. i wanna be the catcher. when it is catch her. its quite important mondegreen.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.139.149.157 (talk) 20:39, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, it is neither. The original poem says, "If a body meet a body," whereas Holden has misremembered it as "if a body catch a body" and has therefore fantasized about becoming a "catcher in the rye." See this page from SparkNotes for more detail.Lawikitejana (talk) 00:58, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  what the... how there isnt reference to catcher in the rye? 

message: The suggested merger is a very bad idea as mondegreens are an intra-lingual phenomenon and soramimi an inter-lingual one.Rykalski (talk) 11:36, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. If someone wants to add the merge tag again, fine. But since there's no seeming support for the merge, I'll remove the tag. -Phoenixrod (talk) 21:52, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

text: For reference, here is some previous discussion opposing the merge: Talk:Mondegreen/Archive_1#.22No.22_for_merge_with_Soramimi. -Phoenixrod (talk) 21:55, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed merger with [[Soramimi]] 

message: Just a suggestion. Given that it's become something of an internet phenomenon, the cover of Mariah Carey's "Without You" by a Bulgarian pop idol entrant who mistakes the words "Can't Live" for "Ken Lee" might be worth including. The entire rendition is full of mis-interpretations. There's an article on it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Lee_(song). I know there are already several pop culture references in this article. What do you think? 82.40.236.77 (talk) 11:50, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ken Lee 

message: The definition currently given says a mondegreen must come from "a line or lyric in a song". Yet a number of the examples given are not of that type. The eponymous example comes from a "ballad", to be sure, but it was one which Sylvia Wright's mother "read" to her, and which she counted as one of her favorite "poems". The other two examples (from Psalm 23 and from "The Charge of the Light Brigade") are not from songs. Other examples cited in the article are not even from poems: e.g. "closed-captioned live television broadcasting of impromptu speeches, interviews, etc." The well-known riffs on the US Pledge of Allegiance ("I led the pigeons to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for Richard Stands … One naked individual, with liberty and justice for all"), if not invented to be funny, are mondegrenous in origin.
Isn't the central characteristic the mishearing involved? The original is pronounced perfectly well (it is not a production error) but it is misheard and/or misanalyzed by the hearer. Of course such mishearings, especially when they become standard, are most obvious and striking when the original is also well-known and standard. Both poetry and song lyrics are among the kinds of speech that becomes standard (in their original and potentially in their mondegreened forms) for certain sub-populations, they both often have unusual words and diction, and for songs in particular it is often difficult to hear the lyrics clearly. Thus they would naturally be especially susceptible to mondegrenous reinterpretation. But mondegreens on other well-known phrases, e.g. from Shakespearian soliloquys, from Lincoln's Gettysburg address or from non-poetic portions of the Bible, have often been reported and seem to me at least to be perfectly reasonable exemplars of the phenomenon. And I see no reason to exclude from the category the more transient cases like the live-broadcasting captions (at least when they are due to human interpretive error rather than machine-induced error.)
So I would propose for the definition something more like: A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song, due to near homophony.
Does something like that seem right?
--Lavintzin (talk) 23:04, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: If you can find a reliable source that has produced a similar definition. Otherwise we are in the land of original research. -- The Red Pen of Doom 00:00, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Lavintzin, the current lead line dates from an edit on 9 April 2008 that replaced the previous version.  That was done with no discussion, and there was no reaction on the talk page until now.  Prior to 9 April, the definition given was remarkably close to yours, except that yours is broader.  The pre-9 April version said: "A mondegreen is the mishearing (usually unintentional) of a phrase as a homophone or near-homophone in such a way that it acquires a new meaning."  And that, or something close to it, goes back to the very beginnings of the article.  It never was sourced.  Finding a source, as RedPen points out, is desirable, but the present (music-oriented) version is no more sourced than the original!  (It is also overly curt and undetailed.)  There is definitely room for improvement.  It seems to me that, absent a reliable source, your proposed definition would serve far better than the present version. Hertz1888 (talk) 01:27, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

text: Looks like a decent citation, and is infinitely better than anything (namely, zilch) that was there before, in the course of nearly seven years.  If it is up to me, I'd say to go for it. Cheers, Hertz1888 (talk) 17:26, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I changed it. I get lost with the conventions for referencing: could somebody add the appropriately-formatted reference to the "Word Detective" and or other online pages. (There are several out there that basically say the same thing.)--Lavintzin (talk) 23:04, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition: must it be from a song?