eggcorn

[Jonathan Lighter]

My guess is that the absolutely dumbest solecisms, malapropisms, eggcorns, mondegreens, stupidisms, etc., almost never gain much currency, because most speakers recognize just how wrong they are.  What's more, those that do manage to linger on in the spoken language rarely supplant a more sensble form in the written language (providing it really is more sensible) since professional writers are even more sensitive to howlers than are most people.

By the time a once-insufferable gaffe of an idiom begins appearing regularly in written standard English, it's been around so long that it's objectionable feature is no longer obvious to most people. "Ain't" was only theoretically "ignorant," but never obviously "illogical." "O.K." required decades of widespread use to go from slang to the level of colloquialism. The grotesque orthographical humor in its etymology probably had to be forgotten before that could have happened. The etymologically ridiculous "irregardless" has been around for a while and shows no sign of disappearing, so I "prophesize" that if it lasts a whole lot longer, only grievous eggheads will have the wherewithal to object.

I recently suggested that "sextuplets" meaning "any set of six children making up the entire offspring of a parent" might be a Sign Of The Apocalypse.  But although the usage is ill-informed, it's not illogical.  "A lady just had sextuplets on reality TV" would still mean the same as it does to us conservatives. If the solecistic usage really gains currency - along with, presumably, similarly misused "triplets," "quadruplets, etc.," I don't think English will be much harmed by it.  Meanwhile, other currents continually enrich the language.

Thus, French from really bad Latin.  If Swift and Defoe could read the best English-language prose of today, they'd have a hissy fit over its barbarism.  Meanwhile, to many of us, their diction has become stodgy and enervated.

"_Mutabilitas_ doth kick our arse : / Thus diction pure can scarce endure." -- Unknown.

JL

"Rex W. Stocklin" <stocklin at EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Rex W. Stocklin"
Subject: Re: eggcorn
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At 11:16 PM -0700 5/16/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

>Rex, Pres. Eisenhower always said "nucular," and he was always
>ridiculed for it. But historians think he made a decent Prez. God
>knows what Lincoln and Jackson sounded like.

A president's record and accomplishments thankfully are not a
function of their phonetics (unless it gets in the way of
particularly tricky diplomacy, say, insulting an Emir by maligning
his daughter's name) but what if a chief exec were incompetent both
of tongue and of brain. Imagine a world like that. It would suck.

>One reason we highly-trained professionals stress that eggcorns and
>other, er, innovations "just are" is that there isn't a God-damned
>thing we can do about them. If you doubt me, get people to quit
>using "ain't."

Wouldn't that be "there ain't a God-damned thing we can do about
them"? ;-) As I understand it, most grammarians widely accept "Ain't"
now, as they do prepositional sentence caps. As well as split
infinitives. But I have yet to read or hear any groundswell take on
acceptance of just any malaprop being accepted because of widespread
misuse. Surely there must be some sort of litmus. But I guess
language IS an art and not a science, so.... As one who falls fairly
midway betwixt the prescriptivist and the descriptivist mindsets, I
am able to cope with a great deal of evolution of the mother tongue,
but not all.

Honk if you love road rage,
Lexy
Fishers, IN

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