When you mishear the lyrics to a song it is called a mondegreen, which is a sort of aural malapropism. Instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word. The word mondegreen is generally used for misheard song lyrics, although technically it can apply to any speech. A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning.
Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that sound similar, and make some kind of sense. American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in her essay “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” published in Harper’s Magazine in November 1954. The term was inspired by “…and Lady Mondegreen,” a misinterpretation of the line “and laid him on the green,” from the Scottish ballad “The Bonnie Earl o Moray.”
Two of the most famous are, “There’s a bathroom on the right (the line at the end of each verse of “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, which is actually, “There’s a bad moon on the rise” and “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy” from Jimi Hendrix singing “Purple Haze,” where he’s actually saying, “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.”
If there was a biblical equivalent to a mondegreen, it might well be the famous 45th verse from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew in the New Testament and the third verse of the final antithesis, which is the commandment: “Love they neighbour as thyself” where Jesus explains why one must love one’s enemies. It is part of the Sermon on the Mount, the longest exposition of teaching by Jesus in the New Testament, where he says in Matthew 5:45, “so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on the bad as well as the good, and sends down rain to fall on the upright and the wicked alike.”
As is usually the case, the King James version of the Bible renders the text most poetically: “That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”
Here in North America, there is a tendency to read this as we’re all going to get miserably wet, as rain is usually viewed as unpleasant, resulting in bad things befalling the good and bad among us in equal measure, so we extend the metaphor to misfortune, illness and death in using the verse to explain why good people have to face trials and tribulations that seem particularly unfair.
The problem with that is the faulty premise in such an exegesis that rain is generally a bad thing, leading us to misinterpret the verse and quote it out of context. Eduard Schweizer, the Swiss New Testament scholar from the University of Zurich, who won the Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies in 1996, noted that in first century Palestine rain was extremely important given the predominance of the hot sun. Rain was a symbol of God’s benevolence. Many scholars feel the correct reading of the verse holds both the rain and sun to be positives.
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