All About Eggcorns, those Myth-Heard Words
Have you ever been confused when your local meteorologist predicted "Apache fog"? Well you've experienced an example of eggcorns, and you're not alone!
A panelist offered an example of a woman who wrote "acorns" as "egg corns" in a misguided attempt at the proper spelling, probably due to her own regional pronunciation of the word. A week later and "eggcorns" came to be formally defined as idiosyncratic substitutions for commonly-used words or expressions.
It doesn't matter your creed, race, native language or nationality: if you use spoken language, you've encountered eggcorns occasionally. These types of auditory mix-ups are among the most common examples of the "myth-heard" in daily life, so in this episode of Mythbusters, we'll explore this unusual topic a bit.
Sweet dreams are made of cheese...
Misheard song lyrics (like those above, misappropriated from the Eurhythmics) are known as "mondegreens," a term coined by writer Sylvia Wright back in 1954. For a while the term was also applied to misheard everyday phrases, but in 2003 it was suggested on the website "Language Log" that they be defined separately.
They're everywhere! They're everywhere!
Like mondegreens, these imaginative errors are homophones, caused by similarities between word sounds. Sometimes they even start to replace the originals. For example, "hone in on" is becoming more common than "home in on" in America, just as "nerve-wrecking" is replacing "nerve-wracking" in the U.K.
By the way, remember that "Apache fog" from the intro? That's not an actual weather term, no matter how cool it seems. It's an eggcorn for "a patchy fog," which can literally cost you "a nominal egg" if you're not careful...because after all, we live in a "doggy dog world" of "no holes barred" irresponsible drivers. Yep.
Politics, Schmolitics
Even people who ought to know better get snared by eggcorns. A few decades back, newspaper columnist and language fan William Safire wrote (possibly apocryphally) about the response of a few observers to a speech by then-President Jimmy Carter, regarding foreign policy in the Mediterranean region.
It seems that after the speech, some political pundits were scratching their heads over a term that the president had used. They had no idea what "a GNC" was, other than a chain of stores that sold nutritional supplements, and somehow, that just didn't seem right in that particular context.
What the President had actually said was "Aegean Sea," referring to the body of water between Greece and Turkey -- something entirely appropriate, given the context. Is there any wonder that we can't get along, when almost willfully-misunderstood eggcorns like this one keep cropping up on the world stage?
