In an article about the film "Moonlight," the film critic for The Toronto Star misheard the term "code-switching," a practice of alternating language or behavior based on the environment and atmosphere, and giddily included the eggcorn in promoting the article.
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Malapropisms, which often create a similar comic effect, are usually near- homophones. See also Eggcorn.
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An eggcorn is the substitution of a word or phrase for words that sound similar.Can you put together a list of the eggcorns in this column?
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Can you put together a list of the eggcorns in this column? An eggcorn is the substitution of a word or phrase for words that sound similar.
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The term eggcorn, as used to refer to this kind of substitution, was coined by professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum in September 2003 in response to an article by Mark Liberman on the website Language Log, a blog for linguists. Liberman discussed the case of a woman who substitutes the phrase egg corn for the word acorn, and he argued that the precise phenomenon lacked a name. Pullum suggested using eggcorn itself as a label.
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Liberman is also the founder of (and frequent contributor to) Language Log, a blog with a broad cast of dozens of professional linguists. The concept of the eggcorn was first proposed in one of his posts there.
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In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect. The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original but plausible in the same context, such as "old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease". An eggcorn can be described as an intra-lingual phono- semantic matching, a matching in which the intended word and substitute are from the same language. Together with other types of same-sounding phrases, eggcorns are sometimes also referred to "oronyms".
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"Toe the line" is often misspelled "tow the line", substituting a familiar verb "tow" for the unfamiliar verbal use of "toe." "Tow" does not accord with any of the proposed etymologies, so "tow the line" is a linguistic eggcorn.
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An eggcorn differs from a malapropism, the latter being a substitution that creates a nonsensical phrase. Classical malapropisms generally derive their comic effect from the fault of the user, while eggcorns are substitutions that exhibit creativity, logic or ignorance. Eggcorns often involve replacing an unfamiliar, archaic, or obscure word with a more common or modern word ("baited breath" for "bated breath"). LexisNexis link The phenomenon is similar to the form of wordplay known as the pun except that, by definition, the speaker or writer intends the pun to have some humorous effect on the recipient, whereas one who speaks or writes an eggcorn is often unaware.
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The Renaissance humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam may have coined the word. A mumpsimus () is a "traditional custom obstinately adhered to however unreasonable it may be", or "someone who obstinately clings to an error, bad habit or prejudice, even after the foible has been exposed and the person humiliated; also, any error, bad habit, or prejudice clung to in this fashion". Thus it may describe behaviour or the person who behaves thus. For example, all intensive purposes is a common eggcorn of the fixed expression all intents and purposes; if a person continues to say the eggcorn even after being made aware of the correct form, either the speaker or the phrase may be called a mumpsimus.
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In popular culture, to rein in means to hold back, slow down, control or limit. Sometimes the eggcorn, reign in, is used. Usage of the opposing free rein dates back to Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400)The Portable Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer, Penguin 1975 page 245Merriam Webster definition of "free rein". Accessed March 3, 2008 and means to give or allow complete freedom, in action and decision, over something.
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Allenby Park continues to be referred to by its original name, it is often mistakenly called the Olympic () Park however, an eggcorn that is easier to pronounce in the Egyptian tongue. Many of the villas deserted by their foreign owners after the Suez Crisis, were bought by wealthy Egyptians. Much like the rest of Alexandria the area has witnessed wide-scale demolition of villas to make room for apartment towers.
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Language Log was started on July 28, 2003, by Liberman and Pullum, a linguist then at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Pullum has since moved to the University of Edinburgh). One early post about a woman who wrote egg corns instead of acorns led to the coinage of the word eggcorn to refer to a type of sporadic or idiosyncratic re-analysis. Another post about commonly recycled phrases in newspaper articles, e.g. "If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z", resulted in the coinage of the word snowclone.
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An expressive loan is a loanword incorporated into the expressive system of the borrowing language, making it resemble native words or onomatopoeia. Expressive loanwords are hard to identify, and by definition, they follow the common phonetic sound change patterns poorly. Likewise, there is a continuum between "pure" loanwords and "expressive" loanwords. The difference to a folk etymology is that a folk etymology or eggcorn is based on misunderstanding, whereas an expressive loan is changed on purpose, the speaker taking the loanword knowing full well that the descriptive quality is different from the original sound and meaning.
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