eggcorn

If there is a connection in meaning, it can be called an eggcorn.

The concept of the eggcorn was first proposed in one of his posts there.

Pullum suggested using "eggcorn" itself as a label for the class of error.

Sometimes the eggcorn, reign in, is used.

What the hell is an eggcorn?

See also Eggcorn.

Yagoda explains, "In 2003, linguist Geoffrey Pullum coined the term eggcorn to refer to common homophone or near-homophone mistakes in which the mistake makes a kind of sense.

It is coincidence that, in Lowland Scots the words "gang green" (go green) can be said to be an eggcorn for gangrene, as it describes the symptoms of the affliction.

In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms).

One early post about a woman who wrote egg corns instead of acorns led to the coinage of the word eggcorn to refer to a type of sporadic or idiosyncratic re-analysis.

"Eggcorn" is itself an eggcorn of "acorn," which a person might defend saying that it is a seed of an oak (hence cornlike) and shaped like an egg.

When I got home that night, the eggcorn led to the mondegreen, which is right up there with the spoonerism, and I forgot that the professor was making a point: spell-check does not catch homophones.

The term eggcorn was coined by a professor of linguistics, Geoffrey Pullum, in September 2003 in response to an article by Mark Liberman on the website Language Log, a blog for linguists.

The difference to a folk etymology is that a folk etymology or eggcorn is based on misunderstanding, whereas an expressive loan is changed on purpose, the speaker taking the loanword knowing full well that the descriptive quality is different from the original sound and meaning.

The phenomenon is very similar to the form of wordplay known as the pun, except that, by definition, the speaker (or writer) intends the pun to have some humorous effect on the recipient, whereas one who speaks or writes an eggcorn is unaware of the mistake.

He cites the Eggcorn Database, and if I were a student of Mr. Yagoda's (he teaches in the journalism school at the University of Delaware, and has written on commas for the Times) this "golden age of eggcorns" would be enough to occupy me for the rest of the semester.