DO YOU get “boggled down” trying to explain things in “lame man’s terms”? When the “chickens come home to roast” do you find yourself “cutting off your nose despite your face”? Do these errors make you want to “kill over and die”? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you have laid an eggcorn.
Eggcorns – derived from a misspelling of “acorn” – are a particular type of language error. Though incorrect, eggcorns are often more satisfying or poetic than the correct word or expression. If you didn’t know how to spell the word “acorn”, then “eggcorn” is a logical and satisfying alternative. A layman is certainly lame compared with an expert, and chickens are as likely to roast as roost. What distinguishes such a mistake from an ordinary malaprop – a word that is unintentionally misused through confusion with one that sounds similar – is the creativity and logic behind them. Eggcorns make sense at some level. Since they were first described in 2003, linguists have been greedily collecting them. The Eggcorn Database (), launched in February last year, already contains more than 560 examples.
What can we learn from eggcorns? Far from being insignificant errors, eggcorns show how people connect what they have heard with what they know, and they demonstrate one way that standard spelling evolves. Dictionaries contain many words that have been shaped by popular use in an eggcorn-like fashion. “Straight-laced” and “just desserts”, for example, are now used more often than their original incarnations, “strait-laced” and “just deserts”, and “hone in on” can be an accepted variation of “home in on”.
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Eggcorns often involve replacing an unfamiliar or archaic word with a more common one, such as “old-timer’s” disease for Alzheimer’s. Foreign words are particularly ripe for eggcorning, as people attempt to find some meaning to incomprehensible terms. “Cole slaw” got its name from the Dutch words for cabbage salad, but as it is served cold, many English speakers have turned it into “cold slaw”. Likewise, the US Peace Corps is often referred to as the Peace Core.
Will eggcorns like these continue to hatch? This is a moot point (or is that a mute point?). While the fluidity of the web allows new spellings to propagate more readily than in the printed form, the huge number of reference books and dictionaries available today tend to fix particular spellings. Anyone waiting with “baited” (bated) breath for “wholescale” (wholesale) changes may have to wait a while.
