Last week we looked at the hows and whys of some words we tend to mispronounce. It turns out we mispronounce some words because we come upon them while reading and apply to them our English-language rules of pronunciation, which are inconsistent to say the least. Also, we’re often at a loss as to which syllable to emphasize when encountering an unfamiliar written word.

A fellow word enthusiast confided in me that while reading the “Harry Potter” books to his children years ago, he pronounced Hermione as “HER-mee-on” (not “her-MY-o-nee”) until the movies came out. It was a total embarrassment to his children, who had been pronouncing it wrong to their friends.

As for why we can even mispronounce some new words and sayings that we hear (as opposed to read), well, that’s sometimes because we’re trying to make sense of something new in a stream of sounds, especially when we have no idea when one word ends and another begins.

So this week, we’ll take a fun (I hope) look at some of the figures of speech that drive us to distraction whenever we hear them in speech and songs.

First up are mondegreens (also called oronyms), which are misheard words or phrases that usually come from songs. They are our brain’s way of substituting familiar words for those of which we just can’t seem to make any sense.

Mondegreens got their name from essayist Sylvia White, who listened to her mother read the Scottish ballad “The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray.” It includes the line: “They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray and laid him on the green.” As a child, White thought her mother said: “They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray and Lady Mondegreen.” The poor woman!

White contends that the misheard versions of something written or sung are often better than the original, and she may be right. Even if she’s not, at least one popular Christmas song has had its lyrics changed permanently because of a misheard word.

In the original version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” the words included “four colly (old English for ‘black’) birds.” By the early 20th century, the mondegreen (which as a term hadn’t yet been coined) won out and we now sing the accepted version, which includes “four calling birds.”

In addition to mondegreens, there are other ways that we can either misunderstand words or misspeak them. One is the good old spoonerism, which is named after the Rev. William Archibald Spooner, and are occurrences in which corresponding vowels or consonants of consecutive words are switched by the speaker.

According to the Daily Herald in 1928, Robert Seton, who was once a student of Spooner’s, stated Spooner “made, to my knowledge, only one ‘spoonerism’ in his life, in 1879, when he stood in the pulpit and announced the hymn ‘Kinkering Kongs their Titles Take’ (‘Conquering Kings their Titles Take’).”

Imagine the hapless, spoonerism-prone announcer who tells his listeners, “The people were dealt a blushing crow (crushing blow) by the politician whose claims that he could pull a habit out of his rat (rabbit out of his hat) turned out to be nothing but a lack of pies (pack of lies).”

One takeoff of the spoonerism is something called a kniferism, which is defined as changing the vowels of two syllables in consecutive words, giving them new meaning. For instance, in 1931, radio presenter Harry von Zell accidentally mispronounced U.S. President Herbert Hoover’s name as “Hoobert Heever.”

Similar to the kniferism is “metathesis” (from the Greek “to put in a different order”), which is the transposition of sounds or letters in a word. For example, did you hear about the nucular (nuclear) scientist who stopped to fill his perscription (prescription) before buying some purty (pretty) jewlery (jewelry) for his wife?

What a guy.