Right as reign
A GLOBE OP-ED writer worries about the government's "sneak and peak" powers. A Wall Street Journal letter writer complains that parents are "fettering away" their power. A Web reviewer calls his cruise-ship scrambled eggs "runny and unpalpable." A
All simple mistakes, you might think, but one of them is not like the others. The first three errors would be easy to correct: Their authors "know" they mean peek, and frittering away, and unpalatable; it's doubtful they would try to tell you that "fettering away" had something to do with handcuffs, or "unpalpable" with the feel of the undercooked eggs. These are misspellings or malapropisms, not signs of underlying beliefs.
Reign is a different story. The original metaphor is equestrian -- a horse has "free rein" when it's not being guided or "reined in" by a rider -- but who knows about reins anymore? Reign, however, is still current, and often it makes just as much sense: The union with free reign is "ruler" of the retirement accounts: Reign isn't right -- though someday, if free rein goes obsolete, it could be -- but it's reasonable in a way that the other three mistakes are not.
Last year, some linguists interested in this kind of error decided to call it an eggcorn, after a pronunciation-based variant spelling of acorn they found. The word eggcorn, like free reign, can be endowed with a semblance of semantic logic -- it looks to be a combination of egg and corn, the seed corn of the oak, perhaps. So an eggcorn is not just a mistake, but a mistake with a back story.
In some ways the eggcorn is the prose equivalent of the mondegreen, the creative misconstrual of bits of song and poetry. Mondegreen takes its name from a misheard line in an old Scottish ballad: "They have slain the earl of Murray/and laid him on the green" was transformed into "and Lady Mondegreen." Though every music fan has a collection of mondegreens, some of the most famous are the Beatles' "the girl with colitis goes by," the mysterious "donzerly light" of "The Star-Spangled Banner," and Jimi Hendrix's "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy." Eggcorns, though, must meet a slightly higher standard of plausibility than mondegreens; in lyrics, as Cole Porter so memorably observed, anything goes.
Eggcorns are all around us: Get untracked, for instance, which is sportswriterese for "get out of a rut, get it together" sounds suspiciously like an erroneous rendering of "get on track." When I explored the history of untracked four years ago, readers assured me the meaning was obvious. But if it's not a mutant, where's the positive form -- tracked, meaning stuck or held down -- from which this negative must have sprung? Till I find that tracked, I'm calling untracked an eggcorn.
Shakespeare's Hamlet said he was "to the manner born," but the eggcorn "to the manor born" has wide currency, and no wonder: It's almost right (though it was a castle, not a mere manor), and nowadays, when real estate is more on our minds than manners, the wrong version is handier. Then there's Julius Caesar's "The die is cast" -- "Iacta alea est," he supposedly said as he crossed the Rubicon. This is about gambling, not metalworking, but despite the Latin, there are folks who doubt it: In the eggcorn version, the irrevocable decision is cast in iron.
My favorite eggcorn, though, is either carrot on a stick or carrot and stick. Which one is right? Nobody knows: Both versions are suggested in the Oxford English Dictionary's citations, but neither is endorsed as definitive. The carrot-on-a-stick crowd, who say the treat is suspended forever in front of the foolish donkey, cite their uncle's mule or "Little Rascals" episodes as evidence. Those who think it's "carrot and stick," a combination of reward and threat, scoff at this cartoonish image. And by now, both versions are so entrenched that even a definitive source wouldn't dislodge the pretender.
You'll find more, much more, in the growing trove of eggcornia at the linguistics website Language Log (www.languagelog.org) -- not just examples, but lessons in eggcorn appreciation as well. Mistakes they may be, but eggcorns are also signs of human creativity and resourcefulness, the linguists who dig them insist. So send in your favorites, and instead of denouncing them we'll see how we like the stories they're trying to tell.
E-mail freeman@globe.com.
