Eggcorn Forum

Eggcorns, which are language behaviors, find their home in a specific communications medium. They are semantic mismappings triggered by similarities in the sounds and orthography of linguistic expressions.

In this forum we have focused almost exclusively on eggcorn moves in spoken and written language. Other media can also carry meanings, however, and presumably such meanings can be mismapped under the influence of media-appropriate similarities. Could the basic motions of eggcorns be replicated in media that are not language-based?
.
Prime candidates for extra-linguistic eggcorns are the various visual media. Painters and sculptors sometimes depict their characters in settings and costumes that are chronologically mismatched with the subject. Many artists do this on purpose, of course. Antoine-Denis Chaudet, who depicted Napoleon in classical garb, had no illusions that Napoleon dressed like a Roman senator. When a sculptor or painter does this context shift intentionally, the move resembles in visual arts what we might call a metaphor in language. Chaudet was playing with the setting of his Napoleon statue to draw certain parallels.
.
But what about unintentional shifts, such as those made by the medieval artists who depicted classical and Biblical characters in everyday medieval costumes (the carvings on this 14th century ivory box, for example)? At least a few of these early artists, it seems likely, really imaged the characters that they were depicting as living a medieval lifestyle. In our own era, Warner Sallman painted Jesus with northern European features, hair, and skin tones. Even if we concede that Sallman made his semantic displacement intentionally, multitudes of those who view his “Head of Christ,” arguably the most widely reproduced piece of art in the twentieth century, map the image without a visual metaphor: the painting simply shows them what Jesus looked like, end of debate (Just keep moving, folks. No Jews here.)
.

When visual artists and their audience unintentionally mismap the meaning component of their work, we may have something like a visual eggcorn. If you find this argument for eggcorns in visual art a little esoteric, consider a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer done for his series to illustrate the Apocalypse of St. John. The woodcut that illustrates this passage in Revelation 9:

And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, “Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.” And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.

The woodcut shows four angels hacking away with swords at a cross section of sinners (Yes, that is the pope stretched out on the ground on the lower right: Dürer, a contemporary of Martin Luther, had Protestant sympathies.).
.

Take a close look at the depiction of God in the upper quadrants of the picture, the figure just above the altar. God is holding three trumpets. Another trumpet has already been given to “the sixth angel which had the trumpet.” The four trumpets in this woodcut are clearly, to Herr Dürer, “the four horns of the golden altar” in the passage depicted in the woodcut. The word “horns” in the passage from the Apocalypse does not, however, refer to trumpets. Altar horns are projections at the four corners of certain ancient altars. These altar bumps were called horns because they were thought to resemble the horns sticking out of an animal’s head. Trumpets are also called horns because of an animal connection: early trumpets were made from animal horns and the term was later broadened to cover certain kinds of brass and wind instruments that were not made from animal horn. Dürer has switched one sense of the word “horn” for another and has reimaged the passage mentioning the horns with the alternate, incorrect sense. (The switch is in German, of course, not English, but the German term, “das Horn,” has the same ambiguities as the English word “horn”).

To ponder: If this mistake of Dürer is not an eggcorn, then what is it? And yet it happens without the artist or the viewer uttering or writing a word.

Last edited by kem (2013-11-25 08:49:43)