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Chris -- 2018-04-11

#1 2012-04-05 12:15:43

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

musical works, false acronym expansions

From my bulging inbox…

Lists of humorous word mistakes, swarms of digital gnats, continue to flit around the Internet. Some get assigned to a fictitious teacher who grades papers. Almost all of the lists are urban legends, in my opinion (“But I know the person who knows the person who collected them!”).

One of the funnier listing categories tells us how young music scholars mishear the names of famous compositions and composers. They have supposedly referred to Bronze Lullaby, Taco Bell Cannon, Beethoven’s Erotica, Tchaikovsky Cracknutter Suite, Gershwin’s Rap City in Blue, Sherbet’s Unfinished Symphony, Rock Monanoff’s First Piano Concerto, Oliphant Chuckerbutty’s Paean (oh, wait, that one’s real).

Some might call these mondegreens. In my mind only the lyrics of songs can form the basis for a mondegreen, not the titles of the songs or their composers (though, of course, many/most song titles are extracted from the lyrics).

Also in my inbox is a collection of Jay Leno’s jaywalking bests. You can view the same video here. The quizzed people are not offering up eggcorns, to be sure, but watching the video made me wonder about faux expansions of acronyms. Two of them appear in this clip: BYOB and DC. When a person thinks that DC, as in Washington, DC, stands for “Da Capitol,” isn’t the mistake much like an eyecorn eggcorn? It’s a semantic reinterpretation that hews to the orthography of the substituted expression.


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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#2 2012-04-05 19:04:15

David Bird
Eggcornista
From: The Hammer, Ontario
Registered: 2009-07-28
Posts: 1690

Re: musical works, false acronym expansions

Funny stuff. There are videos in French of the same sort as the Jaywalks, featuring questions of the same obviousness put to students of my university, with the same gamut of facepalming responses. I won’t point you to them.

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#3 2012-05-04 19:06:48

David Bird
Eggcornista
From: The Hammer, Ontario
Registered: 2009-07-28
Posts: 1690

Re: musical works, false acronym expansions

Here’s an interesting take on lol, from the crossfertile WordReference Portuguese-English exchange forum.

(From Brazil): Estou participando de um forum sobre orquideas e a lingua oficial é ingles (US) e frequentemente os participantes escrevem essa expressão: LOL. O que significa?
[I am participating in a forum on orchids and the official language is English (U.S.) and participants often write this expression: LOL. What does it mean?]
(from France): Lot of laugh
(from Brazil): LOL = “laughing out loud” = rindo muito alto, dando risadas
(from Brazil): Ohh, I feel stupid :S I thought LOL was the uppercase version of lol, who is a person with arms wide open… but I see it isn’t ha ha
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthre … 168&page=2

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#4 2012-05-06 08:17:00

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

Re: musical works, false acronym expansions

The example you cite, David, has all the eggmarks. Hard to see how we can exclude these acronym mutations from the eggcorn category, except by fiat.


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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