LINGUISTIC FORAGING YIELDS A HOARD (HORDE?) OF EGGCORNS

Saturday, August 21, 2004

Now that I have a name for eggcorns, I find them everywhere.

Here's one, from an Op-Ed about education sent in by a reader: [President Bush] "stomps for his 'No Child Left Behind' policy."

Can't you just see the president stomping across the stage to the lectern, preparing for a stump speech on education? That's what makes this an eggcorn, not just the inadvertent substitution of one word for another. It makes a certain weird kind of sense. For someone who has never seen an acorn, or doesn't know an oak tree from a ponderosa pine, why shouldn't mighty oaks from tiny eggcorns grow?

I learned this whimsical term from a blog called Language Log (itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog). Mark Liberman, who is a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, asked in an early post what to call this category of error, and someone reasonably responded, "Call them 'eggcorns' " and the name appears to have stuck. When Liberman first thought of asking Google about them, in January, there were 62 hits, including Language Log but most of the rest authentic examples. When I did it just now, there were 478 and the top ones are generally about linguistics.

Lots of people have contributed to Liberman's eggcorn collection, including me.

That's one of the great things about linguistics. What you need for research is all around you for the taking, like acres of diamonds, and surprisingly little is known about most of it. I had a friend in graduate school at Minnesota who wrote a doctoral dissertation about sentences such as "I like pizza cold." Why would someone say that instead of "I like cold pizza"?

Liberman distinguishes eggcorns from mondegreens, which are substitutions made by people who can't quite make out the lyrics to a song. As in "They have slain the Earl of Moray and Lady Mondegreen."

I'm not making fun of this sort of thing, since it happens to me too. I always knew it was "laid him on the green," but I'm still not sure whether it's Moray or Murray. Google slightly favors Moray.

As long as I'm digressing anyway, let me tell you about a friend of mine who is a fan of the Australian singing group The Seekers, still touring as a reunion group after more than 40 years. He's a serious fan, having gone to their concerts in places as far apart as Australia and Wales. He asked me once if I knew anybody who would be interested in organizing an American reunion tour, and I don't, but if you do, give me a call.

Anyway, he's also someone who gives informal concerts at nursing homes and the like, and once, in order to avoid a mondegreen (points to tenuous connection here), he picked up the phone and called Australia so he could nail down the right words for "the joys of love are fleeting for Pierrot and Columbine."

The scholarly study of eggcorns is well under way. In one post, Liberman notes that English is full of horse and harness metaphors, and since most of us don't have much to do with horses any more, those terms are very vulnerable. "Google has 22,900 instances of 'reins of power' (the original horse-harness metaphor) and 7,120 instances of 'reigns of power' (the eggcorn substitution)," Liberman says.

When eggcorns are rare, they're probably independently generated by people who have "made a sensible but wrong guess about which words are used in a particular expression" he says. Eventually, people use them because they've seen them so often.

"Hunting eggcorns by Web search is so easy that it's hardly sporting," Liberman wrote in June. "All you have to do is to think of a pair of words with the same or similar sounds but different spellings, choose a common usage for one of the pair, and then look for examples in which the other one is substituted."

But mostly it's more fun to spot them in the wild, so with thanks to Liberman's readers, here are a couple of recent sightings.

"Just found this one in the LiveJournal of a programming languages researcher: "Binding my time," instead of 'biding my time,' " a reader e-mailed. Some version of that turns up 1,307 times on Google, Liberman says, giving it a WhG/bp ("Web hits on Google per billion pages") rate of 305.

One I sent was "The public sector unions aren't going to let a team of handfisted amateurs take their overtime away," which seems to make more sense than "hamfisted" anyway.

"It strikes me, by the way, that the culture of writing must significantly decrease the development and spread of eggcorns," Liberman wrote in response. "Eggcorn invention and adoption must be much commoner in pre-literate (or post-literate) cultures. Perhaps there should be a subdiscipline of eggcornology after all, to study such questions."

And now there is.