My Mondegreen

When I was younger, whenever I heard Sting's "Fields of Gold", there was this one line that never made any sense for me, because he would sing "So she took her love / for to gaze awhile / upon the fields of bodies." It made me think this wasn't exactly a good song because of its morbidity, though it sounded really nice regardless. When I told my mother, she burst out laughing because it turned out to be "fields of barley" dear. Heh heh! Well, even if I was wrong, every time I hear that song now, I can't help but remember my wee mistake and laugh about it.

Another episode: in Hall and Oates' song "Every Time You Go Away", I found that when they sang the chorus, for me, it sounded like

they were singing "Every time you go away / you take a piece of meat with you" instead of me!! If this wasn't a song, I would call it a malapropism, which is the substitution of one word that sounds like another, usually for comic effect. Well, in my case, I wasn't trying to be funny. "Meat" was the word I heard, dude.

So today, I was going through the Wiki for malapropisms and found an entry for "mondegreen", which is the word for what I have been doing with song lyrics: misinterpretation due to homophony. Aha! I found you, o elusive vocabulary!