In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, the Hostess (also known as Nell or Mistress Quickly) regularly makes fritters of the English language. At one point in the play, she is beside herself -- apoplectic, in fact -- because she believes that she has been abused by Falstaff. Reaching for words to equal her anger, she tries for "homicidal" three consecutive times. First she calls Falstaff a "honeysuckle villain," then a "honeyseed rogue" and finally she settles on "hempseed." Although "honeysuckle" and "honeyseed" are amusing guesses, we feel --or perhaps I should speak only for myself-- I feel just a bit guilty that I've let Shakespeare amuse me at the expense of an illiterate woman's linguistic lapses.
I have the same reservations about Charles Dickens's jokes on the unlettered; the word "apoplexy," for example, appears as "happyplexy." It makes a second appearance in Great Expectations, when Jo Gargery, of whom much is made that he has never learned to read or write, explains that his father died of a "purple leptic fit."
I think that pillorying linguistic errors is more fun when the perpetrators are not illiterate but pretentious. Such is the case in Sheridan's The Rivals (1775), where Mrs. Malaprop, striving for "pinnacle," refers to a character as "the very pineapple of perfection." The most famous sentence in The Rivals: "Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs" (apprehend, vernacular, arrangement, epithets).
In the last couple of years, there's been an attempt to distinguish a subset of such malapropisms as "eggcorns." The neologism derives from the unlearned collapse of "acorn" into "eggcorn" (a substitution which is more intelligible when the word egg is pronounced as in rural "aig"). An eggcorn is supposed to be a special variety of malapropism in that "the new phrase makes sense on some level ('old-timer's disease' for 'Alzheimer's disease'). But what sort of sense? Why is "baited breath" for "bated breath" anything more than a simple spelling error? For that matter, "honeysuckle villain" and "honeyseed rogue" also make a kind of sense -- a Shakespearean and psychological sense. The Hostess unconsciously reveals that she's sweet on Falstaff.
In any case, there's now an eggcorn database on the internet. A goodly number of the eggcorns are errors that have appeared time without number on student essays. I can't guess how often I used to encounter "peak (or peek) one's curiosity," "leech" for "leach," "peon" for "paean," or "pier" for "peer"; or how many times students would "pour" over their work. I remember being stunned the first time that I encountered "morays" for "mores," but I eventually acclimated to that formidable shock. What can it possibly mean to "reek" havoc? Others common student errors: "spade" for "spayed" (sometimes pluperfectized to "spaded"; "verses" for "versus"; "phase" for "faze"; along with the exceedingly respectful "sirname." I believe that the amount of space I enclosed by circling these common errors as they appeared on coffee-stained student submissions would roughly equal the surface area of Weld County.
The eggcorn database contains some "learned" malapropisms that are new to me. "Hare's breath" and its funhouse mirror twin "hair-brained"; "beyond approach"; "Cadillac converter"; "garbage shoot"; "wet one's appetite." I can't picture "well-quaffed hair," but I can certainly visualize a "wind-powered turban." "It finally donged on me" makes some sense, but "crutch of the matter" is utterly nonsensical. How laid back is a "mellow drama?" To "give up the goat" may have meaning in pastoral societies. My absolute favorite: "pus jewel," as in, "his adolescent face was covered with pus jewels." The avian reference in "one fowl swoop" (for one fell -- i.e. fatal-- swoop) was well anticipated by Macduff: "What, all my pretty chickens and their dam/ In one fell swoop.... O hell-kite."
And speaking of chickens (and eggs), there's also chocolate "eggclair" and "eggtopic" pregnancy, both of which are weirdly inventive, but neither worth (drumroll, maestro!), a pullet surprise.
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