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From my "Carolina" notebook comes the following list:

• Turntable

• Going out tonight

• Groundhog

• Mondegreen
  

When I came across this list recently, I stared for a long time at the word "mondegreen." What did it mean? Did I actually write that? Is it a real thing? The word was very legible, written in my own hand, yet I had no idea what it meant or why I might have written it. So I typed "mondegreen" into a browser window and learned--or apparently, relearned--that a mondegreen is a mishearing of a phrase, often a song lyric or a poem. For example:

The Poetry of Praise

My collection of writers’ notebooks preserves not only my own scribblings but also the blackboard-perfect handwriting of my mother, the self-assured script of her father, the thrillingly chaotic lines of a 95-year-old artist; and the notes of other writers whose struggling penmanship betrays their advanced age. This weekend, while nosing around in search of a writing prompt that I could use in an upcoming workshop, I pulled out a notebook that I thought was my own and opened it to find somebody else’s ramblings—semi-coherent thoughts, often regretful, sprawling across the page and trailing off or ending, abruptly, in midsentence, only to repeat themselves a few pages later. I sighed, put the notebook away, and opened another—whereupon I encountered a similar morass, only this time the notebook was mine. Some of the paragraphs made sense, and some didn’t.

Now I ask you: What could possibly explain…