Editing Mondegreen (section)

==Psychology==
People are more likely to notice what they expect rather than things that are not part of their everyday experiences; this is known as [[confirmation bias]]. A person may mistake an unfamiliar stimulus for a familiar and more plausible version. For example, to consider a well-known mondegreen in the song "[[Purple Haze]]", one may be more likely to hear [[Jimi Hendrix]] singing that he is about to ''kiss this guy'' than that he is about to ''kiss the sky''.<ref>{{cite magazine |url=http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mental-mishaps/201104/bathroom-the-right-misheard-and-misremembered-song-lyrics |title=A Bathroom on the Right? Misheard and Misremembered Song Lyrics |author=Ira Hyman |magazine=Psychology Today |date=8 April 2011}}</ref> Similarly, if a lyric uses words or phrases that the listener is unfamiliar with, or in an uncommon sentence structure, they may be misheard as using more familiar terms.

The creation of mondegreens may be driven in part by [[cognitive dissonance]]; the listener finds it psychologically uncomfortable to listen to a song and not make out the words. [[Steven Connor]] suggests that mondegreens are the result of the brain's constant attempts to make sense of the world by making assumptions to fill in the gaps when it cannot clearly determine what it is hearing. Connor sees mondegreens as the "wrenchings of nonsense into sense".{{efn|"But, though mishearings may appear pleasingly or even subversively to sabotage sense, they are in fact in essence [[negentropic]], which is to say, they push up the slope from random noise to the redundancy of voice, moving therefore from the direction of nonsense to sense, of nondirection to direction. They seem to represent the intolerance of pure phenomena. In this they are different from the misspeakings with which they are often associated. Seeing slips of the ear as simply the auditory complement of slips of the tongue mistakes their programmatic nature and function. Misspeakings are the disorderings of sense by nonsense; mishearings are the wrenchings of nonsense into sense." {{cite web |title=Earslips: Of Mishearings and Mondegreens |author=Steven Connor |url=http://www.stevenconnor.com/earslips/ |date=14 February 2009 |access-date=19 December 2011 |archive-date=12 January 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120112014801/http://www.stevenconnor.com/earslips/ |url-status=live}}}} This dissonance will be most acute when the lyrics are in a language in which the listener is fluent.<ref name=":2">"it turns out that listeners to popular music seem to grope in a fog of blunder, botch, and misprision, making flailing guesses at sense in the face of what seems to be a world of largely unintelligible utterance" {{cite web |title=Earslips: Of Mishearings and Mondegreens |author=Steven Connor |url=http://www.stevenconnor.com/earslips/ |date=14 February 2009 |access-date=19 December 2011 |archive-date=12 January 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120112014801/http://www.stevenconnor.com/earslips/ |url-status=live}}</ref>

On the other hand, [[Steven Pinker]] has observed that mondegreen mishearings tend to be ''less'' plausible than the original lyrics, and that once a listener has "locked in" to a particular misheard interpretation of a song's lyrics, it can remain unquestioned, even when that plausibility becomes strained (see [[mumpsimus]]). Pinker gives the example of a student "stubbornly" mishearing the chorus to "[[Venus (Shocking Blue song)|Venus]]" ("I'm your [[Venus (goddess)|Venus]]") as "I'm your penis", and being surprised that the song was allowed on the radio.<ref name=":3">{{cite book |author=Steven Pinker |title=The Language Instinct |publisher=William Morrow |place=New York |year=1994 |pages=182–183 |isbn=978-0-688-12141-9 |author-link=Steven Pinker |title-link=The Language Instinct }}</ref> The phenomenon may, in some cases, be triggered by people hearing "what they want to hear", as in the case of the song "[[Louie Louie#Lyrics controversy and investigations|Louie Louie]]": parents heard obscenities in the [[The Kingsmen|Kingsmen]] recording where none existed.<ref name=":4">{{cite web |url=http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/funny/lascivious-louie-louie |title=The Lascivious 'Louie Louie' |website=The Smoking Gun |access-date=18 February 2009 |archive-date=21 October 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131021004844/http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/funny/lascivious-louie-louie |url-status=live }}</ref>

[[James Gleick]] states that the mondegreen is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Without the improved communication and language standardization brought about by radio, he argues that there would have been no way to recognize and discuss this shared experience.<ref>{{cite book |title=The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood |place=New York |year=2011 |publisher=Pantheon |author=James Gleick |isbn=978-0-375-42372-7|pages=114–115 |title-link=The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood |author-link=James Gleick }}</ref> Just as mondegreens transform songs based on experience, a [[Folk music#Traditional folk music|folk song]] learned by repetition often is [[Folk process#Operation|transformed]] over time when sung by people in a region where some of the song's references have become obscure. A classic example is "[[The Sweet Trinity|The Golden Vanity]]",<ref>{{cite web|title=Golden Vanity, The [Child 286]|url=http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/ballads/C286.html|access-date=18 April 2019|archive-date=18 April 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190418154356/http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/ballads/C286.html|url-status=dead}}</ref> which contains the line "As she sailed upon the lowland sea". British immigrants carried the song to Appalachia, where later generations of singers, not knowing what the term ''[[North Sea|lowland sea]]'' refers to, transformed it over generations from "lowland" to "lonesome".<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://www.allthelyrics.com/lyrics/carter_family/sinking_in_the_lonesome_sea-lyrics-1176419.html
|title=Sinking In The Lonesome Sea lyrics
|access-date=19 August 2011
|archive-date=23 August 2011
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110823172519/http://www.allthelyrics.com/lyrics/carter_family/sinking_in_the_lonesome_sea-lyrics-1176419.html
|url-status=live
}}</ref>{{efn|Jean Ritchie recorded the ballad on her 1961 Folkways album, ''British Traditional Ballads in the Southern Mountains Volume 1''. Jean's version, which she learned from her mother, corresponds with Story Type A found in Tristram Potter Coffin's ''The British Traditional Ballad in North America''. The refrain "As she sailed upon the low, and lonesome low, She sailed upon the lonesome sea" seems to be typical of variants of the ballads recorded and collected in the Ozarks and Appalachian mountains and references ''The Merry Golden Tree'', ''Weeping Willow Tree'', or ''Green Willow Tree'' as the ship.{{cite web |url=https://mainlynorfolk.info/lloyd/songs/thegoldenvanity.html |title=The Golden Vanity / The Old Virginia Lowlands |work=Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and Other Good Music |access-date=18 April 2019 |archive-date=18 April 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190418152320/https://mainlynorfolk.info/lloyd/songs/thegoldenvanity.html |url-status=live}}}}