No, this is not a weird kind of sports day, although I did make it sound that way to get your attention. Perhaps you’ve heard of spoonerisms, but there are a few other types of funny linguistic errors that I thought worth a mention.
I was fortunate enough to go and see Countdown’s Susie Dent in her touring show in Brighton recently and she talked about spoonerisms, malapropisms, eggcorns and mondegreens. I hadn’t heard of eggcorns or mondegreens, and I thought the whole thing was more than worthy of a blog post, so here we are.
Firstly comes a type verbal howler many of you will have heard of, spoonerisms. Named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, who had a reputation for mixing up words, a spoonerism is when you transpose the initial sound or letter of two or more words. This can result in words that don’t exist being used, such as ‘lalling in fove’ instead of ‘falling in love’. But the funniest type of spoonerism, I think is where the swapped-around words are still real words, such as ‘I’m feeling a wit boozy’ instead of ‘I’m feeling a bit woozy’, or ‘I’d like some keys and parrots’ instead of ‘I’d like some peas and carrots’.
You may have heard of malapropisms, too. The name comes from a French phrase meaning ‘badly for the purpose’. Playwright Richard Sheridan used the word when he named a character in his play ‘The Rivals’ Mrs Malaprop (she famously often mixed up her words). A great example from the fictional Mrs Malaprop herself is when she describes someone as, ‘the very pineapple of politeness’ instead of ‘the very pinnacle of politeness’. Sometimes people use malapropisms on purpose, for comedic effect.
Thirdly, we have mondegreens. These are similar to malapropisms, but happen when you mishear something and create a new meaning. The phrase originated when a writer named Sylvia Wright misheard a line from a Scottish ballad which should have been ‘and laid him on the green’, thinking it was ‘and Lady Mondegreen’. I do this ALL THE TIME with song lyrics: ‘Beelzebub’s got the devil for a sideboard’ etc etc etc. Other examples from songs are ‘Every time you go away/you take a piece of meat with you’ (instead of ‘a piece of me’), and ‘I wear goggles when you are not near’ (instead of ‘My world crumbles when you are not near’).
Finally, we come to eggcorns (remember those from the title of this blog?) The word comes from someone apparently using the word ‘eggcorn’ instead of ‘acorn’ (it’s actually fairly logical when you think about it – an acorn is egg-shaped, isn’t it?) It means replacing a whole word with another similar-sounding one. Some more examples are ‘biting my time’ instead of ‘biding my time’, ‘to all intensive purposes’ instead of ‘to all intents and purposes’, and ‘pass mustard’ instead of ‘pass muster.’ It’s particularly easy to understand how these come into existence, and even take over from the original phrase, when the ‘correct version’ uses words no longer in common use (like ‘muster’).
I hope you’ve enjoyed my Susie Dent-inspired wander through verbal mishaps. Maybe you’d like to message/email me with some of your favourite verbal misadventures!
Photo by Joe Skillington on Unsplash