What's the opposite of a mondegreen?

[thnidu]

The pungine (pun djinn?) in my head has just thrown out an... interesting... mishearing of a couplet from Almost like being in love:

And from the way that I feel
When that belle starts to peel

If you like it, take it and run with it... away, away!

eta: Silly me, of course! It's a mondemagenta! (or "mondepurple" if you'd rather).

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Why is that the opposite of a mondegreen, rather than a mondegreen?

Is it because it's based on true homonyms? That's an interesting subcategory of mondegreens, but I'd say it's still a subcategory.

[thnidu]

Uhhhhh... Yeah, I guess it comes down to that. Thinking sideways and... slid under the door. (Been trying to edit Wikipedia's material on Flat Stanley.) 'Night.

(But I WAS trying to be silly.)

[thnidu]

This is what I just wrote to ace_lightning on LJ to answer the same question there, on the auto-xpost from my own blog:

Another friend asked me that on DW, and the answer only occurred to me today. Mondegreens, like eggcorns, go from the fuzzy or strange to the familiar. This one goes from the familiar ("bell? peal? Sure, I know that expression") to the unusual (belle + peel are not much used in combination, except maybe specifically with respect to strippers, a much less common topic than bells).

Eggcorn: Someone hears a word they don't know (acorn) and "figures it out" in a way that seems to them to make at least some kind of sense for the meaning.

Mondegreen: Someone can't quite figure out a piece of a lyric they've heard sung, often indistinct ('scuse me while I kiss the sky) or in an unfamiliar dialect (They ha' slain the Earl o' Morrey an' laid him on the green) and wrestle it around to something that seems to make some sense (kiss this guy, Lady Mondegreen: names, especially surnames or titles, are more or less given a pass to be unfamiliar, as long as they're not too weird).