Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
When looking up lyrics for a song, I came upon these: http://www.parolesdeclip.fr/love-you-ti … ariya.html
A google search for “make a soul one” brings up only lyrics for this song, and also seem to all feature the additional eggcorn “drawness manning slavery” for “grown-ass men in slavery.” Not sure where it came up first, but it seems lyrics sites never try to transcribe the lyrics themselves if a version is already available, and a search for “timati “make us all one”” brings up exactly three results.
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Welcome to the forum, rsperkins. Regulars on this site have argued at least a couple of times about whether mondegreens (misheard song lyrics, in this case) can be eggcorns. I think that while there may be some overlap between the categories, many mondegreens are the product of the aural circumstances of a particular recording or performance—in my opinion, that disqualifies them for eggcorn status. Since this one doesn’t seem to have any currency outside of lyrics transcriptions, I’d be inclined to label it a non-eggcornish mondegreen.
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A nice example for the sake of deeper discussion.
I agree with Pat’s assessment. One problem with any single recorded version of a song is that any vocal distortion that might be present is preserved—and will indeed get reinforced in the listener’s ear as he plays it over and over. So, for example, ”...s all” may come out sounding like “soul” for that one particular recording … and that would simply reflect the vagary of poor pronunciation. A second recording of the same song might remove this vagary, but the song listener may never hear a second version of a particular song. Given that, I think a term other than “eggcorn” applies, and historically the term has been “Mondegreen.”
Mondegreens also lack another common aspect of eggcorns: the former apply to arbitrary assemblies of words while the latter most characteristically apply to word constructions that are either idiomatic or slightly weaker assemblies which might be described as “in-the-language.” In the current example, I initially had trouble making sense of “us all one” and “a soul one” because they are non-idiomatic snippets that belong to the singular context of the lyric.
Connecting a few dots between the first two paragraphs… Some of the best eggcorns come from the misunderstanding of highly idiomatic expressions. People tend to hear a common idiom from numerous speakers on numerous occasions—but may still come away “mishearing” (or misinterpreting) it every time. This better captures the spirit of a true eggcorn. Not always, but often.
Last edited by jorkel (2010-07-25 09:40:41)
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