Mistakes of the ear can bring us cheer!

A few days after a music teacher told her students that her favorite singer was Ella Fitzgerald, she gave her class a quiz with this extra-credit question: "Who is Ms. Smith's favorite singer?" One student wrote, "Elephants Gerald."

When a man visiting Acadia National Park asked park ranger Deb Hardick where to find "the nesting pair of green falcons," she smiled and directed him to the nesting peregrine falcons.

These delightful slips, sent to me by readers Russ Wise and Deb Flower, respectively, provide terrific examples of mondegreens — errant phrases based on mis-hearings or misinterpretations of spoken words.

The term "mondegreen," coined by the writer Sylvia Wright in 1954, refers to these lines from an old Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray": "They have slain the Earl Amurray, And laid him on the green." As a child, Wright heard the last line as "And Lady Mondegreen," providing us with a handy word for these aural errors.

"The point about what I shall hereafter call 'mondegreens,'" Wright wrote, "is that they are better than the original."

And how.

Many classic "mondies" emerge from misheard song lyrics: "The ants are my friends" ("The answer, my friend" in "Blowin in the Wind" by Bob Dylan); "There's a bathroom on the right" ("There's a bad moon on the rise" in "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival); "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" ("Excuse me while I kiss the sky" in "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix); "The girl with colitis goes by" ("The girl with kaleidoscope eyes" in "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" by the Beatles).

Radio and television broadcasts breed mondies as well. San Francisco columnist Jon Carroll wrote that a reader thought he heard a radio report about the "annual cursed media shower" only to realize it was the "annual Perseid meteor shower." Another reader thought a TV commercial was promoting a car "carved from a glockenspiel." Make that "block of steel."

Word expert Richard Lederer's book "The Bride of Anguished English" offers these delightful mondies from students' papers: "Proteins are composed of a mean old acid"; "Maggie was the valid victorian of our class"; "Taking this course will raise our essay tee scores."

If you or people you know and love have generated any mondegreens lately, please email them to me with grapes attached ... er, great dispatch.

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Conn., invites your language sightings. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via e-mail to Wordguy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.