Eggcorn Forum

Eggcorns and the eggcorns.lascribe.net site are mentioned in Michael Erard’s new book Um…: Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (NY: Pantheon, 2007), pp. 210-12. The eggcorn passage is part of a larger section on the linguistic research of Arnold Zwicky. Eggcorns are classified as a subset of Zwicky’s “classical malapropisms.” Classical malapropisms, such as “it warms the coggles of my heart,” are not “knows better” slips-those who utter them once will probably use them again. When the speaker goes a step further and invents a folk etymology to explain one of these “ossified slips of the tongue” (Um…, p. 210), classical malapropisms transform themselves into eggcorns.

Some stats in the book provide hints about possible eggcorn frequencies. People make one or two slips for every thousand spoken words, Erard notes. In listening to a twenty minute lecture you might find yourself subjected to four or five verbal slips (this does not, by the way, include disfluencies-the same twenty minute lecture might treat you to several hundred ums, ers, backups, and repeats). You yourself, on the day you hear the lecture, will probably make a dozen slips of your own, since people tend to speak about ten thousand words a day. Chances are that you will self-correct at least half of these slips as soon as you utter them, and most of the remaining half dozen will not be detected by your listeners. Still, that’s over three hundred uncorrected, detected slips in a year. No one knows what percentage of slips are eggcorns, of course. But we probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark to guess that adult English speakers manage at least one eggcorn a year.