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39Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy

The mutated Clash lyric shown in the preceding graphic is an example of a mondegreen—or a term that results from the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase. The graphic is a screen shot of an actual question posed on Yahoo! Answers. (Possibly ironically.)

Well-known examples of mondegreens are It doesn't make a difference if we're naked or not (for Bon Jovi's It doesn't make a difference if we make it or not), cross-eyed bear for cross I bear, and perhaps the granddaddy of all mondegreens, Scuse me while I kiss this guy (from Jimi Hendrix's 1967 lyric in “Purple Haze,” Scuse me while I kiss the sky). Which is classic in more ways than one.

Mondegreen was coined by Scottish author Sylvia Write, when her misinterpreting of a Scottish ballad was mentioned in a 1954 article in Harper's Magazine. (She misheard They hae slain the Earl o' Moray and laid him on the green as They hae slain the Earl o' Moray and Lady Mondegreen.)

A subcategory of the mondegreen is the eggcorn, which is also a mishearing or mutation of a phrase, but usually one that makes sense. Examples might be coming down the pipe (instead of the actual phrase of coming down the pike) and butt naked instead of buck naked.

Eggcorns—so named by linguist Geoffrey Pullum in 2003 after noting a substitution of eggcorn for acorn—seem to be growing in number, maybe because many of us ...