30. When Mistakes Become Words

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 30.

When Mistakes Become Words

Mishearings, slips of the tongue and mistakes that got names of their own

Not all language mistakes have the same origin – and only some of them eventually affect the shape of the real language.

The brain does not want to hear nonsense

When we catch an unfamiliar word or a bit of a song, the brain tries to turn it into something familiar. The result is often funny, but it has its own logic. Similar-sounding sounds can be put together into a new word that seems more meaningful to the listener than the original.

Linguists distinguish several different phenomena. To an ordinary person it may all look like simply "mishearing", but the differences hide an interesting story about how the mind processes language.

Eggcorn: an acorn turned into an "egg grain"

The English word acorn means žalud. But someone heard it and started writing it as eggcorn. The form is not random: an acorn is egg-shaped and it is a seed. So the new version seemed sensible to the listener.

In 2003 the linguists Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum used this example to name a whole category of such meaning-driven substitutions: eggcorns. Examples include escape goat instead of scapegoat, or for all intensive purposes instead of for all intents and purposes. These are not recommended standard forms; what is interesting is why they arise.

Mondegreen: a lady who was never in the poem

As a child, the American writer Sylvia Wright misremembered a line about a Scottish nobleman. Instead of the words and laid him on the green she heard and Lady Mondegreen. In 1954 she published this story, and the term mondegreen later came to be used for a mishearing that changes the meaning, typically in song lyrics.

Unlike an eggcorn, the important thing here is not that the listener turns one word into a similar-sounding expression. Often they divide a whole stream of sounds completely differently and create new boundaries between words. That is why mondegreens are so popular with fast-sung choruses.

Malapropism: when you use the wrong clever word

The play The Rivals (1775) features Mrs Malaprop, who tries to speak elegantly but often reaches for a similar-sounding but unsuitable word. Her name became the basis of the term malapropism.

This is not mainly about mishearing. The speaker chooses a different word instead of the intended one. The result can be comic: for example, when someone (in an invented example) confuses historical with hysterical and solemnly announces "a hysterical discovery", even though they meant to talk about a historical one.

Folk etymology: when the word itself is reshaped

Folk etymology is another phenomenon. An unfamiliar part of a word is adapted to a more familiar expression. English bridegroom today looks like a combination of bride and groom. Historically, however, the second part was connected with an old word for man, and only later came closer to the familiar groom.

Changes like this can become permanent in a language. And this is where we see the difference between an individual mistake and language change: the form has to spread among many speakers and survive in everyday use.

When does a mistake become correct English?

Language is not run by a committee that automatically bans every new word. But that does not mean anything goes in a school text. Writing for all intensive purposes is usually still wrong in today's standard English, while some historically reshaped forms no longer surprise anyone.

This gives students a simple rule: when writing, use recorded standard forms, but when listening and reading, think about why a different form arose. Mistakes can reveal the logic of a language much better than a textbook definition.