Long-Nosed Bunny

“Long-Nosed Bunny! Long-Nosed Bunny!”

That’s how this song begins:

Or, at least that’s what we pretended it said when we were kids, just getting into punk rock music.

Today’s piece is all about misheard lyrics. One name for them is mondegreens, coined by writer Sylvia Wright in a 1954 essay for Harper's Magazine. Wright recalled mishearing the lyric from the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray." She thought the lines:

"They hae slain the Earl of Murray,
And laid him on the green,"

were actually:

"They hae slain the Earl of Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen."

"Lady Mondegreen" was just a misinterpretation of "laid him on the green." Wright parlayed this personal experience into a useful vocabulary word, and ever since then, mondegreen has been used to describe misheard song lyrics or poetic phrases.

Here’s another example I bet you’re more familiar with: Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze. Andrew Nevins offers a great explanation as to why this happens here:

Note that the context (kissing the sky) is weird, but the pronunciation is also peculiar here. It’s the combination of clues that encourages our brains to hear ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy.

Here’s one more for you: Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR):

Bad Moon Rising is a great American rock ‘n’ roll song. It has cryptic but meaningful lyrics, fantastic rock guitars and an incredibly memorable riff. “There’s a bad moon on the rise” is eerie and macabre poetry, but so many of us will hear “there’s a bathroom on the right” instead.

This seems less profound.

Now, one dude I know of has made an entire career off of misheard lyrics. He’s Weird Al Yankovic, and I wrote about him here:

I like to finish each piece by asking you to help me think about something, and this one’s really easy today: what misheard lyrics (mondegreens) are in your world?

Let’s talk about this!