

To be fair, human beings can be just as guilty. This VH1 site is dedicated to how much we've misunderstood our favorite songs. And Jimmy Fallon's new show, Lip Sync Battle (Thursdays 10pm/9c on Spike TV), is filled with big stars pouring their hearts into live performances of their favorite songs -- sometimes with mistaken lyrics.
When a word is misheard or misinterpreted, whether by human or computer, it creates new meaning, and that's called a mondegreen. Here are some clsssic examples:

Sometimes we commit so completely to our misunderstanding of a song's lyrics -- even after we've been corrected -- we can't imagine the song any other way. That's called mumpsimus.
A few years ago, I gave a talk called The Poetry of Misunderstanding. I argued that mishearing, misremembering and misunderstanding sometimes lead to magical consequences. The idea that the new thing that's created when something gets lost in translation...is sometimes more beautiful, exciting and profound than the original thing we misunderstood.
Holden Caufield's misinterpretation Robert Burns' poem, Comin' Thro The Rye, lies at the heart of The Catcher In The Rye. Jimi Hendrix loved misquoted lyrics of his songs so much, he often performed them that way in concert. And then there's the famous mistranscription of Fall Out Boy's hit song, Sugar We're Doing Down, which I'd argue makes the song infinitely more enjoyable.
Now technology has given us another reason to laugh and celebrate, this time in the form of an unremarkable, unwitting rookie from the Sacramento Kings, who may never achieve a thing on the court, but who shall live on forever as... a sauce.
