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Ever heard of a "mondegreen?"
Mondegreen
"Blinded by the light!
Wrapped up like a douche in on a runner in the night…."
I knew that couldn't possibly be right, but I'd listened to the song a gajillion times, and I was never able to make any more sense of it than that. It's got to be a "mondegreen," a misheard song lyric. It's been driving me insane since some no-name band scored a megahit with this silly song thirty years ago. And the singing on it is so hard to make out, you can search the net and find a dozen or so more mondegreens from this one line by various listeners: "Wrapped up like a deuce, another motor in the night." "Wrapped up like the douchins of a roamer in the night." "Took off like the juice, another roller in the night."
Today, with the magic of the Internet search engine, it's easy as pi to find out that the actual lyric sung by Manfred Mann, the group who made this song popular, was, "Wrapped up like a deuce, another runner in the night." Of course, the fact that most of the misheard versions made more sense than the actual lyric goes a long way towards explaining the mass of mondegreens this lyric has generated.
According to Evan Morris, "The Word Detective,"(one of my favorite sources for fascinating information on where expressions in English come from, and easy to find with any search engine), the expression "mondegreen" comes from a classic example from an old Scottish Ballad, "The Bonny Earl of Murray." It seems that in 1954, the writer Sylvia Wright thought that one of the lines in the poem went, "They hae slay the Earl of Murray, and Lady Mondegreen." Keen to discover who this unfortunate and mysterious "Lady Mondegreen" might be, Ms. Wright was terribly embarrassed, as we all might imagine, when she finally learned that there was never any such person; the lyric in fact read, "They hae slay the Earl of Murray and LAID HIM ON THE GREEN."
So since 1954, the term "mondegreen" has been used to describe any incorrect idea of what a lyric is supposed to say. Such as Jimmi Hendrix's ever famous, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy!" ("Excuse me while I kiss THE SKY").
I'll bet you all know some good ones. Do we want to post them in Jokes, Games, or in Music/Dance? I'm sure you'll figure it out. Have fun!
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA USA
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Language pair: English; All
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