There’s a bathroom on the right.

Dear Word Detective: I heard a word used to describe the substitution of song lyrics, those frequently encountered situations when someone has made up words that they thought were the lyrics but often are crazy substitutions. I wrote the word down when I heard it but have since misplaced the scrap of paper. I can only remember the last syllable sounded like “green.” (It’s the time of year when my husband sings Christmas carols with the horrible lyrics that he and his brothers made up.) — Kathy Jaworski.

Hey, a lot of carols could use new lyrics. When I was growing up, my parents taught us the improved version of one old chestnut, penned by Walt Kelly in his immortal “Pogo” comic strip: “Deck us all with Boston Charlie, Walla Walla, Wash., an’ Kalamazoo!, Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley, Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo! Don’t we know archaic barrel, Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou? Trolley Molly don’t love Harold, Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!” To this day a voice in my head says “Boston Charlie” whenever I hear that tune.

The word you’re looking for is “mondegreen,” and your definition is on the money, especially the fact that the person has to believe that the mangled lyrics are the real ones. Your husband’s creations, while no doubt worthwhile, do not count as “mondegreens.”

I’ve written about “mondegreens” several times over the years, but I can now report that the word has finally made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines the species as “A misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing, especially of the lyrics to a song.” The term was invented in 1954 by the writer Sylvia Wright, who as a child had heard her mother recite the Scottish ballad ”The Bonny Earl of Murray.” Wright interpreted one stanza as “Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands, Oh where hae you been?, They hae slay the Earl of Murray, And Lady Mondegreen.” Wright later learned that the line actually was “They hae slay the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green.” Sic transit Lady Mondegreen, but Wright rescued her by memorializing her name as a term for the phenomenon.

Scottish ballads being a bit in eclipse these days, the primary source for modern “mondegreens” has been pop, folk and rock music (“Ducks in the wind, all we are is ducks in the wind…”).

I might be interested if the tiles were edible.

Dear Word Detective: I come from Scotland but now live in the U.S. I was playing a Scrabble game and used the word “bing” but it was not in the Scrabble dictionary. I am sure my husband used it when talking about the coal mines. Maybe it was slang. Any help you can give me will be much appreciated. — Sophie Murray.

Oh boy, Scrabble. I love word games. Wait, no, sorry, I just remembered that I actually hate word games. The rub is that people naturally assume that I must be very good at word games, which I am not. Perhaps I could be if I tried, but I don’t plan to try. I’m with grammarian Geoffrey Pullum when he says, “The expressive power of human language is barely adequate to convey the profound level of apathy word puzzles provoke in me.” (You can read his entire rant, which I heartily recommend, here).

I’m not sure who concocts Scrabble dictionaries or what criteria they use when admitting words to their hallowed roster, but for my money they blew it in the case of “bing.” It is, as the Simpsons would say, a perfectly cromulent word.

“Bing” first appeared in English in the early 16th century meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “A heap or pile: formerly of stones, earth, trees, dead bodies, as well as of corn, potatoes, and the like.” Although that general meaning is still in use in dialects of northern England, by around 1815, “bing” had acquired the specific meaning of “a heap of metallic, especially lead, ore” or alum ore, which explains how you husband came to mention it in connection with mines. “Bing,” since the late 17th century, had also been applied to the best, richest ores (“bing ore”). The root of “bing” in English is the Old Norse word “bing,” meaning simply “heap.”

One wonders, incidentally, when “cromulent” will make it into dictionaries. To quote Wikipedia on the term’s origins on The Simpsons, “When schoolteacher Edna Krabappel hears the Springfield town motto, ‘A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man,’ she comments she’d never heard of the word ’embiggens’ before moving to Springfield. Miss Hoover, another teacher, replies, ‘I don’t know why; it’s a perfectly cromulent word’.”