Friday, May 22, 2009
How do you like your eggcorns?
I've recently started writing a column for the Nashville Free Press. Here's the first one.
The English language is wonderful. The best estimates of the available vocabulary range from about 600,000 to a million words. In the right hands it can make us weep or cry, sometimes simultaneously. And that's without even using all of it, not to mention the new words that are being added daily, such as “misunderestimate.”
Like any good software, English (and most languages, in fact) has a lot of redundancy built in. We can raed a stencene lkie this one and usrdnenatd it. We can solve acrostic puzzles, using scattered letters and the lengths of missing words to reconstruct a sentence. We can usually guess what the word at the top of the next column or page will be. (Of course, a lot of this is thanks to our amazing brains as well, but this is a column about language.)
Redundancy doesn't only catch errors and fill in gaps. It also gives us puns and all sorts of wordplay, and mondegreens and eggcorns.
A mondegreen is the mishearing of a song so that we rearrange the sounds into different words, as with the classic hymn, “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear,” or the Jimi Hendrix lyric, “'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”
An eggcorn is similar, but is based on some common word or phrase that we mis-hear and reinterpret in our own way. “Eggcorn” for “acorn” is the eponymous error, and you can see how it almost makes sense.
Of course, in the modern world we now have machines that can create eggcorns for us. I have a collection of phrases, many from student phrases, and I'm fairly sure that some of them--”a girl fried” and “a calibration of life,” for example--come from excessive reliance on spelling checkers. (Let me interject a favorite peeve here: While I sometimes check my spelling, I rarely make a mistake with my spells, and never do them on the computer. I do not use a spell checker.)
Many of the best eggcorns, though, come out of creative ignorance. George Orwell, in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” complains about some of the early sightings, such as “tow the line,” which appears to have something to do with barges rather than the orderly disposition of feet. The very best open up new lines of meaning for us to think about. The young man who complained about the “pre-Madonna” on his football team had a vague sense of what he meant to say, but the gaps in his knowledge let pop-culture and classical religious iconographies seep in. The student who was “knocked incautious” may well have been a poor speller, but has also introduced a new understanding of human behavior.
At their finest, eggcorns approach poetry. They offer alternative interpretations, giving us a deck from which we can launch our own creativity. In fact, I've already written six poems based on my collection. (To be honest, the first wasn't based on an eggcorn, but on this line from a final exam: “Writing, for me, is a way of putting my thoughts on paper.” That's an idea that gives a writing teacher a warm glow of achievement.) I take them all literally, as though the original authors knew what they were saying. Literalism isn't often the best approach to poetry, but it's working for me.
I do have an interesting sense of conflict about this. I'm getting good material from these mistakes, but one of my day jobs is to teach students not to make them any more. If my campaign ever succeeds, and I get people to think before they commit their words to paper, I'll run the risk of running out of ideas for this series of poems. On the other hand, I've already got dozens stockpiled. That should last me, at the very least, through my summer vocation.
Like any good software, English (and most languages, in fact) has a lot of redundancy built in. We can raed a stencene lkie this one and usrdnenatd it. We can solve acrostic puzzles, using scattered letters and the lengths of missing words to reconstruct a sentence. We can usually guess what the word at the top of the next column or page will be. (Of course, a lot of this is thanks to our amazing brains as well, but this is a column about language.)
Redundancy doesn't only catch errors and fill in gaps. It also gives us puns and all sorts of wordplay, and mondegreens and eggcorns.
A mondegreen is the mishearing of a song so that we rearrange the sounds into different words, as with the classic hymn, “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear,” or the Jimi Hendrix lyric, “'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”
An eggcorn is similar, but is based on some common word or phrase that we mis-hear and reinterpret in our own way. “Eggcorn” for “acorn” is the eponymous error, and you can see how it almost makes sense.
Of course, in the modern world we now have machines that can create eggcorns for us. I have a collection of phrases, many from student phrases, and I'm fairly sure that some of them--”a girl fried” and “a calibration of life,” for example--come from excessive reliance on spelling checkers. (Let me interject a favorite peeve here: While I sometimes check my spelling, I rarely make a mistake with my spells, and never do them on the computer. I do not use a spell checker.)
Many of the best eggcorns, though, come out of creative ignorance. George Orwell, in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” complains about some of the early sightings, such as “tow the line,” which appears to have something to do with barges rather than the orderly disposition of feet. The very best open up new lines of meaning for us to think about. The young man who complained about the “pre-Madonna” on his football team had a vague sense of what he meant to say, but the gaps in his knowledge let pop-culture and classical religious iconographies seep in. The student who was “knocked incautious” may well have been a poor speller, but has also introduced a new understanding of human behavior.
At their finest, eggcorns approach poetry. They offer alternative interpretations, giving us a deck from which we can launch our own creativity. In fact, I've already written six poems based on my collection. (To be honest, the first wasn't based on an eggcorn, but on this line from a final exam: “Writing, for me, is a way of putting my thoughts on paper.” That's an idea that gives a writing teacher a warm glow of achievement.) I take them all literally, as though the original authors knew what they were saying. Literalism isn't often the best approach to poetry, but it's working for me.
I do have an interesting sense of conflict about this. I'm getting good material from these mistakes, but one of my day jobs is to teach students not to make them any more. If my campaign ever succeeds, and I get people to think before they commit their words to paper, I'll run the risk of running out of ideas for this series of poems. On the other hand, I've already got dozens stockpiled. That should last me, at the very least, through my summer vocation.
