things that are not eggcorns

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 9, 2007, at 9:31 AM, David A. Daniel wrote:

> Can an eggcorn be created on purpose? John D. MacDonald's book,
> "The Green
> Ripper", one of the Travis McGee series, gets it title from a
> (fictional)
> child's misunderstanding of the Grim Reaper. The kid lives in fear
> that the
> Green Ripper will someday come to get him. It may well be that
> MacDonald
> actually knew of a real-life instance of this and then used it for
> the story
> but dunno. So: Does an eggcorn have to be an accident in order to an
> eggcorn?

we had a discussion here starting 6 june. on "play malaprops" (that
was the original subject line), things like "cast nasturtiums on".
the discussion then extended to "deliberate mistakes" (the next
subject line) in general.

all types of errors can be imitated by intentional creations.  these
mock errors look like the real thing (more or less), but they have a
different source and should not be lumped in with true errors
(whether advertent or inadvertent).

the larger point is that the categories are not picked out by their
form alone, but by their form in combination with the (presumed or
inferred) mechanism that gives rise to them.  (otherwise, all the
phenomena we're talking about would just be labeled as either "wrong
spelling" or "wrong word choice", which would provide no insight into
the psycholinguistics and/or sociolinguistics of the matter.)

so yes, there are certainly mock eggcorns.  but a mock X is not an X.

arnold

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