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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 10th October 2007

A mondegreen is a term for a misheard word or phrase from a poem, song or piece of prose. It derives from a couplet in an old ballad, ‘They hae slain the Earl Murray/ And laid him on the green’, with the last line misheard as ‘And Lady Mondegreen’. Mondegreen was coined in Harper’s Magazine by Sylvia Wright in 1954. I’ve just been leafing through a collection of mondegreens and malapropisms by Martin Toseland in The Ants Are My Friends (Portico Books, £9.99) The title refers to a mishearing of the Bob Dylan lyric ‘the answer my friend’ (is blowing in the wind).

Mr Toseland also includes eggcorns. This neologism was brought into use on Language Log, an internet blog, in 2003, to refer to a kind of folk etymology that rationalises words (such as acorn) into new forms (such as eggcorn). The Language Log compilers say that such coinages are not examples of folk etymology because they are not (like sparrow-grass for asparagus) shared by a whole language community. But eggcorns do have a habit of spreading. An example cited on another blog is midrift for midriff. This I have certainly heard for years.

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