Eggcorn Forum

Thank you, sambell, for calling our attention to “nipply.” This is one of those slips that circulates widely as a pun. It was featured, for example, in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.(youtube clip).

The relationship between puns and eggcorns is complex. Eggcorns are inadvertent. Puns are usually the opposite (advertent?). Some slips that start off as eggcorns become puns when the language community in which the expression is embedded becomes more sophisticated about the way a word is used. A case in point is the previous sentence. The tens of thousands of instances of the word “eggcorn” on this forum are not, strictly speaking, instances of the eggcorn “eggcorn.” They are punning references to an event that really was, we believe, an eggcorn for certain speakers (Perhaps “eggcorn” is still an eggcorn, but I double dare anyone to find an example of it on a web cluttered with references to the word as a figure of speech.).

Certain other words reverse the process: they start off as puns and become eggcorns. Taking this second track, turning a pun into an inadvertent eggcorn, can be tricky. The speakers who employs the expression must somehow miss the point of the pun while still using the images evoked by the punning word to complete their semantic frameworks, and they must persist in this blinkered condition long enough for the once-punned expression to become standard usage for them. The clip from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation illustrates the complexity of the problem. For Chevy Chase and the script writer the word “nipply” is, of course, a pun, plain and simple. For the character Chevy plays in the movie, Clark Grisword, “nipply” is an inadvertent slip, one that we typically call a “Freudian slip” because it exposes a hidden track of thinking. But using “nipply” to refer to cold weather is not really standard for Clark, as he proves when he corrects the slip. We can go one step further, in fact, and say that the writer of the dialogue presupposes that “nipply” is not an eggcorn. The writer put the “nipply” line in the dialogue to evoke laughter. A goal that would fail if “nipply” was an eggcorn, since a person for whom “nipply” was standard usage would either not get the joke or would have to extract some sexual reference from “nippy” that was more evocative than “nipply.”

The assumptions of the authors of the dialogue are just assumptions. It is possible that their assumptions are universally true. Looking at examples of “nipply” on the web, I’m fairly certain that in some of the instances the writers have navigated the laborinth described above and have turned the pun into an eggcorn. It’s hard to know for sure, however, because contexts that might prove the speaker is making use of the imagery of an erect nipple are also the cases that are most likely to be puns.

Last edited by kem (2009-08-31 21:24:52)

Good thing I didn’t triple dare you.