Mondegreens are words misheard in song lyrics that still make a kind of sense, such as misunderstanding Just like a white-winged dove as Just like a one-winged dove. They’re sometimes called oronyms. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Mondegreens and Oronyms”
We’ve talked before on the show about mondegreens, those misheard lyrics like there’s a bathroom on the right instead of there’s a bad moon on the rise.
And the other day I learned that a friend of mine for years thought that the Stevie Nicks song about just like a white winged dove was just like a one-winged dove, which is very sad. How is a one-winged dove flying? No.
I also learned just the other day that there’s another term for this, which is oronym, O-R-O-N-Y-M. And this refers to these word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided in several different ways.
Because, you know, if you think about it in spoken language, we don’t have the same white spaces in between words. And so it’s easy for those words to slide together in different ways.
You know, we have to make sense of that when we’re talking. And a lot of times we don’t think about that.
But, I mean, a great example of that is the I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.
Right. We divide differently.
So sometimes it’s correct division and sometimes it’s misdivision.
Right. And it’s kind of amazing how much work we’re doing in our minds to sort those things out.
And sometimes we make mistakes, and that results in mondegreens and oronyms.
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