EGGCORNS, MALAPROPS, AND MONDEGREENS – A Guest Post by Author Jeanne Matthews

As a child, I recited the words of the Lord’s Prayer as I heard them. “Our Father who art in heaven, how Lord be thy name?” It made sense that you wouldn’t say an ordinary “Hi” to the Lord, and the word “hallowed” wasn’t yet in my vocabulary. Turns out, there’s a linguistic term for my mistake. I had committed an “eggcorn.”

A woman who misheard the word “acorn” inspired the coinage. “From little eggcorns mighty oaks do grow.” My favorite eggcorn is a twist on the idiom “raked over the coals.” Recounting the story of a bad day at the office, a friend informed me that she’d been “raped over the coals.” I figured it was probably a mistake, but she worked for litigators. It wasn’t impossible.

The difference between an eggcorn and a malapropism is plausibility. Mrs. Malaprop, a fictional character in a 1775 play by Richard Sheridan, was forever inserting a nonsensical, out-of-context word in place of the similar sounding correct word. Malapropisms are constantly creeping into political discourse. Former Chicago Mayor Daley touted “Alcoholics Unanimous” and Australia’s Tony Abbott reminds us that “No one is the suppository of all wisdom.”

Misunderstood song lyrics are called mondegreens, a word derived from an old Scottish ballad. “They hae slain the Earl O’Moray and laid him on the green.” The writer Sylvia Wright heard it as “They hae slain the Earl O’ Moray and Lady Mondegreen.” Credence Clearwater gave us a memorable mondegreen in their hit “Bad Moon Rising.” Was that last line “There’s a bad moon on the rise” or “There’s a bathroom on the right”?

Jeanne Matthews is the author of the Dinah Pelerin mysteries.  Her most recent novel is Devil by the Tail, an historical mystery set in Chicago just after the Civil War.