From a linguistic point of view, there are three things of interest here:- What does it mean?
- Why does the title refer to Purple Haze?
- What is a mondegreen?
Next, Purple Haze. This is the name of a song recorded by Jimi Hendrix in 1967. It includes the lyrics "I kiss the sky" which people often heard as "I kiss this guy". In fact, this became so well established that Jimi Hendrix actually sometimes deliberately sang it that way.
Finally, a mondegreen is a phrase that is misunderstood because it is mis-parsed. (It was coined by the American writer Sylvia Wright who, when she was young, misheard the phrase "and laid him on the green" from a poem as "and Lady Mondegreen".)
What is interesting about this is the levels of allusion − reference to something else without which you cannot understand what is going on.
I have explained it all here; but I think that the way we write stuff nowadays is being substantially influenced by the Internet. Language Log did not attempt to explain the joke, or the allusions to Jimi Hendrix, or what a mondegreen is, partly because it is assumed that readers will already know all of this, but also because it is assumed that people can easily find it out themselves. And the assumption that this kind of information is easily available at the click of a button is maybe fundamentally changing the way we represent language on the web.
I guess in reality I should not have explained the joke or the allusions!
