Eggcorn Forum

We now have our second eggcorn book from a major publisher in as many years. It is The African Svelte: Ingenious Misspellings That Make Surprising Sense by Daniel Menaker, drawings by Roz Chast (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).

This new effort shows a closer familiarity with the Forum than Rubin’s book does. In the Introduction, Menaker says “A group blog called the Language Log, and another, the Eggcorn Forum—which is among the funniest, most thoughtful, and most authoritative examples of Internet verbal error sites—lists subgroups of language errors, almost to the point of emulating particle physics, with its never-ending supply of new tinynesses, each importantly different from the other. In the credits at the end, he tips his hat to “the Eggcorn Forum—a kind of outgrowth of the Language Log—originated and brilliantly supervised by Christ Waigl.”

Menaker’s book gives us about hundred examples, many fewer than Rubin’s 600. But his discussions tend to be longer, as you might imagine.

Both books are a fun read. Participants of this forum will find more of what they enjoy here. You will not find many entries in these books that have not been discussed on the Database or in the Forum, however. There are a few words and phrases, though, that have not crossed our pages, and, as I have time and inspiration, I’ll mention some of these in this thread. Other Forum users who have access to one or both of these books, please jump in.

You should also be aware that both authors, though they take the concept of an eggcorn as their point of departure, have included in their lists a number of examples that are not eggcorns. They do not usually note these divergences in their discussions. In their defense, though, is the fact that they do not claim to be publishing nothing but eggcorns. Note Rubin’s use of “modern malapropisms” in his title. Menaker actually calls his eggcorns “sveltes” (an eggcorn of “veldt” and used in his book’s title). He bases the distinction between “svelte” and “eggcorn” on whether or not they are print based (sveltes) or occur in spoken conversation (eggcorns). While this distinction will not bear much weight, it does allows Menaker to have his own neologism and, with it, the right to dictate what counts and what does not count as a svelte.

The first new-to-us eggcorn that we can extract from Daniel Menaker’s book is the one in the title of his book; “svelte” for “veldt.”

It passes the five tests for an eggcorn:

(1) Syntactical: It’s occurrence in the idiom “African Svelte” makes it almost certain that the user is not applying the word “svelte” in the normal process of phrase building (e.g. “a svelte figure”). In addition, “svelte” is an adjective and would not normally occur in a noun slot, suggesting the influence of a sound-alike noun.
(2) Phonological: “svelte” inserts an /s/ phoneme. Phoneme insertions are a much less common way of forming eggcorns than phoneme deletions. And /s/ is not a typical insert. Still, we do have one other example—“holster top” for “halter top.”
(3) Semantic: The meaning of “svelte” as “smooth” transits nicely to the flat veldt, the open grasslands of southern Africa.
(4) Not another category: “African Svelte” is not a mondegreen, spoonerism, or folk etymology. It is an unlikely silicism (anticipation error, typo, cupertino, etc).
(5) Vocabulary uptake: There are dozens of examples of “African Svelte” on the web that are replacements of “African Veldt.” Several occur in recent subsidy-published books. For example:

Book by Sage Publishers “The high southern and eastern plateaus include the South African svelte and the Kalahari Desert.”

I’d call it an eggcorn, grade A.

kem wrote:

Sometimes, I think, we reach a bit too far in the Forum…in trying to find plausible semantic connections. Speakers have less awareness of this than we imagine.

But conscious awareness is not necessary for an eggcornish meaning connection. It seems self-evident to me that our word choices are often informed by sound and meaning associations that are below the threshold of conscious attention. In my poetry, my words are often chosen to evoke images, feelings and layers of meaning that may bypass explicit conscious awareness. When successful, this can evoke certain moods and, by extension, behaviors—including the generation of eggcorns triggered by semantic connections which the perp never clearly cognized.

But conscious awareness is not necessary for an eggcornish meaning connection. It seems self-evident to me that our word choices are often informed by sound and meaning associations that are below the threshold of conscious attention.

I wonder about this. Permitting deeply subconscious motivations to fulfill the semantic requirement of an eggcorn threatens to turn all sound-based malapropisms into eggcorns, since we can always find some association, however tenuous, between the meaning of an acorn and the meaning of its candidate eggcorn. What we can’t know in these situations is whether a substantial number of those who have adopted a soundalike substitution actually take one of the obscure paths that we identify. Eggcorns of the sort that we deal with in the Database and Forum seem to require a false etymology component—the eggcorner not only has to use the eggcorn regularly, she also has to have some misplaced justification for using it. Which would require some level of conscious usage.

Last edited by kem (2017-01-25 18:52:46)

Menaker’s sixth eggcorn (?) is “kneed in” for “knead in.” The justification? The two words “share a physically vigorous, not to say aggressive, even violent, meaning.” Seems like a bit of a reach.