Eggcorn Forum

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.