They slew the Earl of Moray. And Lady Mondegreen. That was how Sylvia Wright heard it.
She was a child then. A child with ears full of story. The poem was old. Scottish. The Bonny Earl of Moray. A ballad, sung or spoken, never printed in type until the child grew into a woman with memory and clarity. The line was meant to go:
“They hae slain the Earl of Moray,
And laid him on the green.”
But she heard a woman die beside him. A lady. His companion. His ghost. His echo.
Lady Mondegreen never lived. But once she was heard, she couldn’t be unheard. She lived in the mind, in the mistake, in the music of mishearing. Sylvia Wright gave her a name, and in doing so, gave a name to a kind of truth born of error.
She wrote it down in 1954. Harper’s Magazine. She told the story as plainly as it had come to her. Not just the single misheard line, but a whole phenomenon. A trick of the ear. A glitch of perception. Words turned inside out by rhyme, rhythm, dialect. And so she said: this has a name. Let it be Mondegreen.
The word is odd. But it fits. A private ghost made public. And it stuck.
We’ve all heard them. There’s a bathroom on the right. Hold me closer, Tony Danza. The girl with colitis goes by. They echo through radios and cassette players, in showers and grocery aisles. Misheard lyrics. Fractured lines. Mondegreens.
They’re not lies. They are the honest confusion of the ear. The poetry of misunderstanding. A truth not intended, but not without meaning.
In that way, Sylvia Wright did not make a mistake. She named one.
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