Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I just had a great laugh from the Facebook group Eggcorn Hunt Club. Someone posted an example of someone using Audubon for ottoman, and added the comment “I want to ask her if I can drive really fast on her ottoman.” Later in the thread, having realized that she’d eggcorned Audubon into Autobahn (the German freeway), she posted “I just realized I eggcorned my eggcorn. Boy, is my face red!” ROTFLMAO!
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Fun malapropisms. How are they eggcorns?
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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DavidTuggy wrote:
Fun malapropisms. How are they eggcorns?
It seems to have been fairly well established in previous discussions here that a Lehmann can involve proper names as both acorn and eggcorn. See, for example, this remark (on the term “Guan Panama Bay”) from an esteemed eggcornista, one DavidTuggy:
Again, it’s a matter of definitions. I would have said “Lehmanns happen when we replace some piece of an acorn structure (be it a noun, proper or common, or some other full or partial structure) with a proper noun.â€
To be sure, the replaced structure fairly often is a common noun. It was in the eponymous example ( Lehmann < layman .) Often enough it isn’t, though… That is what I see happening in GuanPanama ; the morpheme partial tánamo , which means nothing by itself, is replaced by the meaningful Panama . The fact that this takes place within a toponym (geographical place name) I would have thought basically irrelevant.
It has also been pretty much established here that the proper noun(s) in a Lehmann need not have a specific meaning that makes sense in context, (nor even refer to someone or someplace that actually exists) because the perp may assume that the person or place mentioned is a real one and is relevantly meaningful in some way they’re just not aware of. For instance, one needn’t know why a piece of furniture is called an ottoman to use the term as either an acorn or an eggcorn. One would just presume that there’s a meaningful reason why that sort of furniture is associated with the Ottoman Empire, just as one presumes there’s a meaningful reason why a certain sort of choice is Hobson’s without knowing who Hobson was or if he/she even existed. So, with proper names as acorn, eggcorn, or both, the requirement for a meaning-connection is reduced to the perp’s assumption that there must be some unknown reason the name of that person or place is associated with the meaning implied in the context of the substitution. Audubon for ottoman seems to me to be just such a case. Regardless of whether the perp knows anything about John James Audubon, he/she can assume there’s some reason that name is associated with that type of furniture and make the substitution. This is common in Lehmanns. So I’d argue for eggcornicity (Lehmann type) of Audubon << ottoman.
Autobahn << Audubon may be more problematical, as auto is a meaningful unit understood by anglophones, which would require the eggcorn to have some sort of meaning connection with auto (unless the perp imagines auto in the context of Autobahn to be a “purely proper” noun which only coincidentally looks like the word auto). So you may be right about Autobahn << Audubon not being an eggcorn, but I think that Audubon << ottoman, needing only to satisfy the “unknown but presumed meaning associations of proper nouns” criterion of Lehmanns, could be a real eggcorn.
Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2015-12-28 13:06:45)
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OK. I didn’t deny that they could be eggcorns, just asked you for elucidation.
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I do agree that Audubon can be a Lehmann-type eggcorn, though I also want (and feel the lack of) an ornithological connection. But Autobahn is not a Lehmann; the putative eggcorn means “high-speed German freewayâ€, and that does not work for most contexts where ottoman might be thought of. Even the context in which it occurred the perp was clearly making a funny; there was awareness on her part that she was playing around with similar-sounding words, and she did not think the first-level perp had anything about freeways in mind.
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Anyway, as you said, it is a very entertaining series of switches.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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DavidTuggy wrote:
I do agree that Audubon can be a Lehmann-type eggcorn, though I also want (and feel the lack of) an ornithological connection.
I’m inclined to agree with you on that, David, but check out these comments from two different people in the associated comment thread: “I thought maybe it was stuffed with feathers, hence the Audubon reference.” “It makes sense. Didn’t Audubon paint his works based on animals that had been stuffed?”
Even the context in which it occurred the perp was clearly making a funny; there was awareness on her part that she was playing around with similar-sounding words, and she did not think the first-level perp had anything about freeways in mind.
If you go back and read my quote from the perp in the initial post of this thread, you’ll see that her substitution of Autobahn for ottoman was not on purpose. It was an embarrassing mistake for her. So, regardless of its (lack of) eggcornicity, we can’t file that particular substitution under “purposeful word-play”.
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I do not think that Lehmans are eggcorns, except in the rare cases where the proper name that is the eggcorn has achieved common noun status (I remember arguing, for example, that “annie” in penny annie poker might be an eggcorn because “annie” has iconic status as the name of an impoverished waif).
“Audubon” for “ottoman” is problematic, even as a Lehman, because the name “Audubon” is not a placeholder. It is freighted with significance and its significance (J. J. Audubon’s status as an artist and naturalist) is difficult to map onto senses of “ottoman.”
An irrelevant aside: one of my fav poems is Stephen Vincent Benet’s poetic bio of Audubon.
Last edited by kem (2016-01-11 14:21:05)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Audobohn? Autubahn? Audiban? (Your fingers get so tangled you can’t see where you’re saying, as the saying is.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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kem wrote:
“Audubon” for “ottoman” is problematic, even as a Lehman, because the name “Audubon” is not a placeholder. It is freighted with significance and its significance (J. J. Audubon’s status as an artist and naturalist) is difficult to map onto senses of “ottoman.”
It is freighted with significance only to those who know who Audubon was. For the (many) others, it could fall into the category of “Some guy who has something to do with this sort of stool we call an ‘Audubon’”. It is assumed that the meaning connection is there, but that the perp just doesn’t know what the connection is because he/she knows nothing of the person named. Again, I argue that the perp’s presumption of some (unknown to them) meaning connection is sufficient for eggcornicity. On top of that, in this case, we do have attestations from two perps about their assumed meaning connection—see the two quotes I give in post #5 of this thread).
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see the two quotes I give in post #5 of this thread
Good point. Those who do know something about Audubon may find a connection through “stuffed.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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