Forced Mondegreens

6 thoughts
last posted Feb. 4, 2013, 2:48 a.m.
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It occurs to me this is all a classic example of priming in psychology.

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In both cases, a mondegreen was possible but the visual context the song was placed in forced the mondegreen (at least if you didn't know the song before).

Now that I've come up with a term for it, I'll be on the look out for more examples :-)

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Another example occurs in the fourth season of Breaking Bad when the activities of prostitute Wendy are backed by The Association's song Windy. Again, I was hearing "Wendy" until I looked the song up.

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The first example I came across was a couple of years ago when a UK television station played a montage of then Prime Minister Gordon Brown to The Stranglers' song Golden Brown. Until I looked it up, I thought the song was saying "Gordon Brown"!

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A mondegreen is the mishearing of lyrics resulting in a new meaning. Read the linked Wikipedia article for examples.

What I'd like to propose here is the term forced mondegreen for those cases where an image or images are shown along with a song to force (or at least encourage) a particular mishearing.