Eggcorns and self-promotion

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 8/15/07, JAMES A. LANDAU Netscape. Just the Net You Need.
>
>> From: Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
>>
>> To be fair, Mark Peters' Babble article on eggcorns includes a
mondegreen ("You're
>> a grand old flag, you're a high-fivin' flag"), so it would be easy
for a non-initiate to
>> miss the distinction.
>
> Now you've got me confused.  Are you saying that an eggcorn has to make sense
> (just not the sense that the original phrase did)?  If so, then a mondegreen is an
> eggcorn if it makes sense?

Yes, that's correct. I didn't mean to imply that they were mutually
exclusive categories. See my follow-up post where I gave the ad-hoc
label "mondeggcorn" to the intersection of the two phenomena.


--Ben Zimmer

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