Who doesn’t love reading the Grammarly blog (http://www.grammarly.com/blog)?  Really?  Not everyone?  Well, no matter.  Fortunately, I read it regularly and can share grammar wisdom with my handful of readers.

Today, I learned about eggcorns–words that sound similar to and have a meaning that sort of works in place of the original word.  (Who knew there was a real word for errors like this?  Thanks to Grammarly, now we do.)  The term eggcorn appeared in an article by a linguist in September 2003 and described the case of a woman who used the word eggcorn instead of acorn.  To qualify as an eggcorn, the substituted sound must preserve at least some sense of the original word.  Eggcorn appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2010 and Merriam-Webster recognized it in 2015.

Lip singing is an example of an eggcorn.  Lip singing involves people moving their lips as if they were singing, and sounds a lot like lip syncing, the original word.  Another example is old timer’s disease which sounds like Alzheimer’s disease and mostly affects the elderly.  Eardropping means that you are listening in on someone else’s conversation, much like eavesdropping.  A self-refilling prophecy not only fulfills itself, but apparently does so repeatedly.

There are some other types of errors that don’t count as eggcorns.  One is the mondegreen, which is similar to an eggcorn, but misconstrues the lyrics to a song or other type of performance, such as “Hang on, Snoopy (Sloopy)” by the McCoys.  Listeners (me) of Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival might hear “There’s a bathroom on the right” for the line “There’s a bad moon on the rise.”  (Again, who knew there was a real word for this?)  Another type of error is the malapropism, which features a similar substitution of sounds, but results in a word or phrase that doesn’t make sense within the context.  “Illiterate (obliterate) him from your memory” and “comprehending (apprehending) criminals” are malapropisms.

Tonight, I heard an eggcorn in actual usage when the TV newscaster unwittingly referred to the students’ after-curricular activities, rather than using the original term, extra-curricular activities.  My all-time favorite eggcorn, however, is a word Kari used when she was about five years old:  rememory.  It’s so good, I sometimes deliberately use it when I have a rememory.  I personally think rememory is an excellent word, and I’d put it on an advanced eggcorn level because it uses similar sounds of two related words to make a combined meaning of remembering a memory.  Go, Kari.  You rock!