WE ALL KNOW now that Taylor Swift wasn’t singing about a romance in a coffee shop in her song, Blank Space.
The misheard lyrics, “all the lonely Starbucks lovers” is ACTUALLY “got a long list of ex lovers” and it’s become something of a meme.
But why do we mishear lyrics like this? New York Magazine have finally cleared up the phenomenon. It’s all down to a slip of the ear referred to by linguists as mondegreens.
They were discovered by writer Slyvia Wright who misheard ‘and laid him on the green’ as ‘and lady mondegreen’ and began creating a story around her.
They offer the explanation that these mondegreens form as the human brain is built to make sense out of the nonsensical. So if you don’t quite catch something, you completely come up with a new explanation as to what it means.
The last reason, is that words can bleed into each other in songs. The way Taylor sings the string of words is an example of an ‘unusual metrical alignment’ as ‘of’ and ‘ex’ are squeezed into one beat and sound like Starbucks.
So now we know.
