Lifestyles

Renaissance Redneck: Eggcorns galore

By David Kittredge
I recently stumbled over the term eggcorn in my Google meanderings and I must say that I was greatly relieved when I found that the eggcorn has nothing to do with the science of podiatry. The word “eggcorn” became a new part of speech back in 2003 when recognized by Prof. Geoffrey Pullum of the University of Edinburgh. An eggcorn is a substitute word which approximates the sound of the original term, as evidenced by the fact that eggcorn is derived from the word acorn and is used in its place. An eggcorn is an unintended pun when first uttered but, once realized the unintentional word or phrase can be used just for fun.

But, before I go totally all English tutor on you here are a few of the more amusing examples of eggcorns that I found: “Curled up in the feeble position,” “a pigment of one’s imagination,” “sow one’s wild oaks,” and “spread like wildflowers,” just to name a few.

An historic example of an eggcorn that might have occurred in Sullivan County is the naming of the Sugar River which may have been a slight mispronunciation of the name of a local Native American tribe called the Shugah Indians. I believe I got that notion from my father and it sounds plausible to me.

Eggcorns can appear in writing when confusing a pair of homophones or words that sound alike but, have different meanings. Examples of these are words such as “bow” and “bough,” “hair” and “hare,” or “isle” and “aisle.” I probably have committed an eggcorn or too in my hen scratchings to the annoyance of my editors.

There are a couple of comical eggcorns that are used for medical conditions, which are “Arthuritis” for arthritis, and “Old timers’ disease” for Alzheimer’s disease. In the latter case, the substitute “Old timers’ disease” actually makes much more sense than the original moniker.

At times, an eggcorn can be a slight mispronunciation of a word when saying “self phone” instead of “cell phone,” substituting “Catillac” for “Cadillac,” or saying “Cadillac converter” in lieu of “catalytic converter.”

My mother and her siblings spent time in Lyme on a family farm when they were children and they picked up a few eggcorns there. When referring to a chimney, they would often say “chimbley” instead, or they would substitute the word “electrician” with the term “electwician.” When I first realized that my uncles’ and my mother’s altered the pronunciation of these words, I wondered if perhaps it was caused by some congenital medical condition and I was a bit worried. Initially, I was too polite and embarrassed to broach the subject but, I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and asked my Uncle Ron directly about the mispronunciation. He chuckled and said that was the way they talked when they were kids on the farm and it was just a joke. Whew, I was greatly relieved.

Uncle Ron had other eggcorns that he used from time to time. If he was flustered, instead of swearing he would say, “By Jean’s rice!” and I’ll leave that one for you to figure out. My uncle would refer to the area towns as “Hangover”, or “White River Johnson” and for the town of Bellows Falls you can simply swap the two capitalized letters to produce an eggcorn, which I found quite amusing as a teenaged boy.

The pun is a close cousin of the eggcorn and was initially frowned upon. Samuel Johnson, an English writer and moralist, once called the pun the lowest form of humor. Obviously, Mr. Johnson was not a pun-loving boy and I suspect that the job of moralist might have been a detriment to his having a good sense of humor. In the mid-nineteen hundreds, Oscar Levant, concert pianist and humorist added to Johnson’s original assessment of the pun when he quipped: “A pun is the lowest form of humor; when you don’t think of it first.” In 1972, the movie director Alfred Hitchcock directly contradicted Samuel Johnson when he told interviewer Dick Cavett that “Puns are the highest form of literature.” So, no matter where you stand, puns if not overused can be fun, and can be especially amusing to use in front of youngsters to help them develop their sense of humor.

Many of us have bellowed these pun filled lines as children, “Ice cream, I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!”, which is part of a song that was written in 1927. One of my favorite old time puns was one my father told me, “It’s raining cats and dogs and there are poodles in the streets.” These days this might come under the heading of a “dad joke” or to some a “bad dad joke,” depending on your point of view or taste.

A few years ago, the State of New Hampshire ran a tourism slogan containing a pun that read: “New Hampshire: Don’t take it for granite.”

One of the most intricate puns I have ever seen was written by Jeff Moran aka. Dr. Chordate, and goes thusly: “A super calloused fragile mystic vexed by halitosi,” which is a parody of a nonsensical, once popular, song from the 1964 movie, “Mary Poppins,” starring Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews. If you don’t recognize the song, try saying the quoted sentence out loud, because there is no way that I am going to attempt to type out the original name.

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