Eggcorn Forum

Jan Freeman reflects on the recent OED inclusion of “eggcorn.” In her article she surveys the territories claimed by eggcorns, mondegreens, malapropisms, and folk etymologies. The borders, she notes, are not “bright lines.” Her perspective on the landscape is the same one that many of us have arrived at. And a timely reminder that the plats are drawn as much by what we think an eggcorn isn’t as by what we think an eggcorn is.

Last edited by kem (2010-09-25 10:27:39)

“Eggcorn” as an OED headword entry is step one. The next step is for the OED to use the word eggcorn in its definitions.

The OED may not have had the word “eggcorn” in its stable of descriptors before the twenty oughts, but it has always found some way to recognize eggcorn events. This week I read through entries in which we appealed to OED discussions and gleaned from them the various expressions that OED writers have used to describe eggcorns. Here is a cross-section of what I found: (Y is the acorn, X the similar-sounding eggcorn)

“X closely approaches in meaning the etymologically unrelated Y”
“the meaning of X appears to have arisen by confusion with Y”
“the word Y was corrupted to X”
“X was confused with Y”
“X makes some allusion to Y”
“X is an alteration of Y”
“X imports the meaning of Y”
“the association of X with Y has led to the substitution of X for Y”
“people were spelling Y as X”
“some Englishmen were led to the erroneous notion that X was the original and correct form of Y”
“X is probably after Y (? errroneous)”
“the unetymological spelling of X with [the letters of ] Y”
“X and Y have often been confused – when X has this meaning it has some affinity with Y when it has this meaning”

How long before the OED editors will deem the word “eggcorn” an acceptable substitute for some of these paraphrases? Longer, I suspect, than the six years it took for the newly minted word to appear as a dictionary headword. The journey from the time when a word is coined to the time when it can be used by slang-shy lexicographers to describe other words is measured in decades, not years. I looked through the words added by the OED in the 1990s, for example, and I didn’t find any that I would expect current OED editors to use in their dictionary prose. We would be shocked, I think, to read in an OED etymology that a word was “a mixmastered Frankenword that should be rewilded to its original spelling,” but chances are that words from the nineties will become acceptable editorial prose before a 2010 entry such as “eggcorn” loses its taint of slang.