A more recent phenomenon that expands upon the original concept of the mondegreen (song or poem lyrics misunderstood) is the deliberate misunderstanding known as buffalax. The term comes from the YouTube user name of someone who found a music video in Tamil and added subtitles spelling out what the song lyrics sound like if you interpret them as English.
Here's the original buffalax video. (Note that as of this posting it's been viewed over 23 million times!)
For comparison on how the practice has spread, here's a song by one of my favorite artists in Taiwan. In this one the original music video is discarded in favor of a flash animation that depicts the spurious "English" lyrics.
This is great. It is not so much a new take, but a very new medium for an old take. It is good that it finally has a name. Thank you for pointing this out.
I will not tell you in what year I was introduced to this work of Luis d'Antin van Rooten published in 1967:
Mots d'heures: Gousses, Rames (Mother Goose Rhymes)
Wikipedia on Mots d'heures: Gousses, Rames
An excerpt (perhaps one of the most memorable — Un petit d'un petit — Humpty Dumpty):
Un petit d'un petit
S'étonne aux Halles
Un petit d'un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu'importe un petit d'un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes.
One of the great features of this magnum opus — clearly a seminal work to have foreshadowed this modern phenomenon — is that the author glosses various phrases and, in a mockery of scholarship, provides interpretation of the actual meaning of the French (translation mine):
e.g.
Un petit d'un petit [1] [trans.: A child of a child]
S'étonne aux Halles [2] [trans.: Gapes at Les Halles] …
[1] The inevitable result of a child marriage.
[2] The subject of this epigrammatic poem is obviously from the provinces, since a native Parisian would take this famous old market for granted.
Ron Draney said:
A more recent phenomenon that expands upon the original concept of the mondegreen (song or poem lyrics misunderstood) is the deliberate misunderstanding known as buffalax. The term comes from the YouTube user name of someone who found a music video in Tamil and added subtitles spelling out what the song lyrics sound like if you interpret them as English.
Here's the original buffalax video. (Note that as of this posting it's been viewed over 23 million times!)
For comparison on how the practice has spread, here's a song by one of my favorite artists in Taiwan. In this one the original music video is discarded in favor of a flash animation that depicts the spurious "English" lyrics.
A mondegreen that popped up in one of my ESL classes was a reference to Mister Miner (Meaner). After a moment I realized the expression was meant to be "misdemeanor."
Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, Ph.D (English), Scholar in Residence
Western New Mexico University