Eggcorns
August 9, 2006 language No CommentsToday I read some student comments about our library. One includes a positive statement about our “study carols.” This immediately brought to mind an article I had read earlier in the day in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In “Like a Bowl in a China Shop,” [subscribers only] writing teacher Mark Peters recommended that eggcorns present a teaching opportunity richer than sending a student to a dictionary to learn (if the student knew where to look) that the correct spelling is “acorns.” Yet from those little nutty eggs mighty oaks do rise.
The editor of the Eggcorns Database explains that
“here, we take the stance that the errors we collect and they are lexical errors, no doubt about that are noteworthy because they are interesting. They tell us something about how ordinary speakers and writers make sense of the language they use. And eggcorns are not like just any amusing erroneous substitution: they are special because they arise when a writer knows an expression well enough to employ it in an appropriate context, but is mistaken about the term's or its constituents' meanings, origins or the underlying metaphors.”
Other eggcorns are boggled down, girdle one's loins, on the spurt of the moment, getting one's dandruff up, and manner from heaven. I am not sure that “study carol” qualifies as an eggcorn, but it does appear in unexpected places–even on an Ivy League Website and the Website of a library at another prominent university.
