When you listen to a recording of a language that you don’t speak, you hear a continuous stream of sounds that is more a warbling than a string of discernable words. Human speech occurs without breaks: when one word ends and another begins, we don’t actually pause to signal the transition. What should be clear becomes ambiguous, and our brain must do its best to resolve the ambiguity. Other times, the misperceptions come from the nature of the speech itself, for example when someone speaks in an unfamiliar accent or when the usual structure of stresses and inflections changes, as it does in a poem or a song. One of the reasons we often mishear song lyrics is that there’s a lot of noise to get through, and we usually can’t see the musicians’ faces.

The simplest cases occur when we just mishear something: it’s noisy, and we lack the visual cues to help us out (this can happen on the phone, on the radio, across cubicles-basically anytime we can’t see the mouth of the speaker). What’s less immediately clear is why, precisely, that happens. You hear the same acoustic information as everyone else, but your brain doesn’t interpret it the same way. Mondegreens occur when, somewhere between the sound and the meaning, communication breaks down. And then there is the meaning-making: the part where your brain takes the noise and imbues it with significance. First, there is the auditory perception itself: the physics of sound waves making their way through your ear and into the auditory cortex of your brain. They left the poor Earl and “laid him on the green.” He was, alas, all by himself. Her favorite verse began with the lines, “Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands / Oh, where hae ye been? / They hae slain the Earl Amurray, / And Lady Mondegreen.” Except they hadn’t. When she was young, her mother would read to her from the “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,” a 1765 book of popular poems and ballads. In November, 1954, Sylvia Wright, an American writer, published a piece in Harper_’_ s where she admitted to a gross childhood mishearing.

The term mondegreen is itself a mondegreen. “Mondegreen” means a misheard word or phrase that makes sense in your head, but is, in fact, entirely incorrect. My sister’s creation of a night of drunk driving from jumping and jiving is actually a common phenomenon, with the curious name mondegreen. In one Wallflowers hit, for instance, she somehow turned “me and Cinderella” into “the incinerator.” My favorite, though, remains that classic of the swing age, “Drunk driving, then you wake up”-a garbling of the Louis Prima hit that saw a brief resurgence in the nineties, “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail.”

When we were younger, song meanings would often morph into something quite different from their original intent. My sister has a rare talent for mishearing lyrics.

The sound lyrics