“Strangers in the night, exchanging glasses”

Abstract

Abstract This article deals with the phenomenon of mondegreens, a term coined in 1954 to describe when a listener to a pop song mishears the lyrics and sings her own version instead, as in Strangers in the night, exchanging glasses (rather than glances). A distinction is made in the literature between within-language mondegreens, which occur when a listener produces a mondegreen in the same language as the original (as in Strangers in the night, exchanging glasses), and cross-language mondegreens, when a listener produces a mondegreen in a different language to the original (as in the German Agathe Bauer for the English I’ve got the power). The key question that the article addresses is: Why do we mondegreen? After providing an overview of the approaches to both within-language and cross-language mondegreens that have been taken in linguistics and related disciplines, the article then draws on cognitive psychology and its approach to creativity to argue that mondegreens are in fact better understood not so much as simple errors as products of the creative mind.