Eggcorn Forum

Hi, Pete, and welcome to the forum.
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I think there was a previous post about “haycorn”. It should be at https://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/2/eggcorn/
but there is something wrong with the site right now and that page and the main database page won’t come up. The search engine result was the following incomplete citation:

And Piglet calls them “haycorns”. What’s up with that? Quote: “I’m planting a haycorn, Pooh, so that it can grow up into an oak-tree”. 3. Commentary by Mr Cat , 2006/01/22 at 10:34 pm. Piglet says haycorn as he pronounces the ‘a’ like ‘hay’, thus Mr AA wrote it that way. Great writing comes with a free creative licence. 4.

I don’t know what else may be in that entry. But generally, puns and conscious wordplay are not eggcorns. To be an eggcorn the non-standard form must (1) be standard for somebody, i.e. they use it without knowing it is non-standard, and (2) make sense to them in a novel way, involve a shift in imagery, as some have phrased it. An egg-corn is an egg-shaped seed (=corn) of an oak tree; I don’t see myself how hay makes sense in any such way. And I don’t know of anybody who uses the form outside of the Pooh stories. (They might, of course.)
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A pun may involve the same structure as an eggcorn, but the punster is using it knowing very well, in fact using it precisely because, it is non-standard. Milne’s haycorn is clearly in that ballpark. Some of the best puns do indeed shift the imagery and make sense in a striking new way. They perhaps may become eggcorns if somebody hears the pun and learns it thinking it is the standard form. We have sometimes called these “eggplants”, but they are a somewhat peripheral kind of eggcorns.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2018-03-21 17:39:35)