Rubble Rousing
Double in size, double in size….is not what INXS intended. Their rock anthem – Devil Inside – is among thousands of lyrics we mishear across the airwaves, from Mice Aroma (My Sharona) to Where Was The Thunder (Werewolves of London) to Louise the Bra Eater (La Isla Bonita).
There’s a Dallas Crane song about jetplanes and skyscrapers – the two meeting in ugly jihad circumstances – and I thought the whole thing was about a rocky love affair until I found the lyric sheet…
Such popular gaffes are labelled mondegreens, after an olde-time Scottish ballad – The Bonnie Earl O’Murray – where Lady Mondegreen is minted from the actual phrase, ‘and laid him on the green.’
Ditch the music, and the conversational counterpart is known as an eggcorn, a common mishearing of the oak’s humble origins. Kids do it all the time. We say ‘all for nought’ and they think it’s all for knot – which of course, it is not.
Linguists spend whole semesters trying to separate human eggcorns (such as ‘spurt of the moment’) from malapropisms, where the wrong word is implanted through a mental disconnect (such as telling amusing antidotes, or phoning the RSVP if your car breaks down).
Evidence of this eggheaded behaviour regarding eggcorns, false eggcorns, and questionable eggcorns is to be found at the Eggcorn Database, no less, where some of my faves include:
+ Old Timer’s disease
+ curled up in the feeble position
+ lack toast intolerant, and
+ in lame man’s terms.
I must admit to malapropping a few months back – mid-interview which is worse – saying how I was prepared to conceive the point. In my foetal defence I can cite the anxiety of having a large Triple-R microphone in my moosh.
Re eggcorning, if all goes well, I’m sure to dredge a few transgressions from my past. As a kid I did wonder why anyone hoed hard roads, and why rock-n-rollers etc put their pedals to the medal. What false phrases have you detected, or uttered in your salad daze? I’m sure with a few confessions and observations we can amass a dozen eggcorns.
August 19th, 2009 at 1:01 am
My favourite was a friend’s child who drew a picture of the Crucifiction. She had drawn a very peculiar crucifix fitted with red flashing lights and boomgates. When asked about it, she explained that Jesus died on the crossing.
September 4th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
For a long time my daughter was keen to visit Sydney in order to climb the Centipede Tower.
I’d always suspected that eggcorn, um, couldn’t be topped until I read a tertiary student’s article last year, telling me that about the excellent panorama to be enjoyed from the observation deck of the Centrelink Tower.
(You’d have to pay me as well, walking up all those stairs.)
March 2nd, 2010 at 12:48 am
At one stage I worked at triple 0. If a caller was on a mobile it was imperative to find out which town and state they were in. A caller had trouble recollecting what state he was in. But after a few ums and aah said he was in the ACTU.
March 2nd, 2010 at 8:33 am
Nice one. Like the time my car broke down, and that same Centipede girl in my life suggested I call the RSVP.