The View From Carnegie 210

Wendy, you have lots of good thoughts here. I thought I might just add some of my ideas. Like you, I was also confused at first about eggcorns and what they are exactly. I think of them as multi word homophones. Such as, to, too, and two, and there, their, and they're. This is a dangerous comparison because homophones, when pronounced correctly sound identical; yet most eggcorns only sound the same as real sayings because they are being mispronounced. Still, it helps me to understand them better. This idea of mispronounciation brings me to my next point. I believe that the main cause of eggcorns is mumbled speech. Mumbling is something that we have not yet talked about in class, but that is very prevalent in our society today. I think this has a lot to do with lazy co-articulation; which, in my opinion, stems from the rushed feeling many people have. We try to fit so much into our lives that we are always stressed and hurried. This may sound like a stretch but I really feel that the hasty pace of everyday life affects the way we speak; and the result, mishaps like eggcorns.

In terms of malapropisms I think that it depends on whether we are giving a formal speech or speaking casually with friends. When we are giving a speech we are, or at least should be, more aware of what we are saying. Where, with friends we arenâ??t always as aware. We may be more conscious of what is going on around us as we speak, and our speech is more spontaneous. In speech giving, we may be able to think and stop ourselves before we make a malapropism because we are aware we are presenting to a large group of people and our speech is expected to be smooth and errorless, and we have had a chance to prepare. With friends, our speech is more readily flowing and casual, which allows us to make room for these word slips because we have not prepared what we were going to say in advance, and we may be thinking faster than what our brain can process. As we have discussed in class, if we make malapropisms while speaking quickly I think that the listener more than the speaker may be less likely to pick up on the mistake. This may be because the listener may not even recognize it. And here I think that education plays a role in how much we can pick up on these slips because it may depend on how much vocabulary and grammar each individual knows.

Hey Wendy,

The way I think of acorns are just similar sounding words. They don't necessarily have anything to do with eachother, but they are usually just a few syllables different in their pronunciation. I know that I say them all the time. I tend to speak really fast and and blend my words together. I guess that is the co-articulation factor we have already talked about. Our society just doesn't care about pronouncing every syllable of every word correctly, and half the time we're mumbling because we insist on speaking so fast, leading to eggcorns. And to top it off, since they sound so similar to the actual word, I think eggcorns are even harder to notice than the use of uh and um. So I wonder if maybe we have a tolerance for eggcorns the same way we do for uh and um. Even though we aren't saying the right word, our listeners usually understand what we are talking about.

I would just like to clarify that eggcorns are often related in meaning...so they aren't just words that have been run together. So, eggcorns do have some special status in that they are not just mispronunciations. In addition, as Erard points out, another requirement of an eggcorn is that it is used consistently by a speaker who doesn't realize the mix-up.