In my last post I vented about a couple of pet peeves, namely reading "peaked" when the writer meant "piqued" and "tow the line" instead of the correct "toe the line."
That's the grammarian side of me. The linguist side of me knows that such uses are called "eggcorns," a word coined by the people over at Language Log to describe the phenomenon of a word being misperceived by a speaker or writer and rendered in a different form that yet makes sense. The word that started it all, "eggcorn," is really "acorn," but part of the acorn is egg-shaped, and it is a seed, kind of like corn, and thus is not really an illogical construction. Similarly, "peaked" can be said to make sense in that one's interest may reach a peak that causes one to investigate a matter further. "Tow the line" makes sense if one thinks of a line as, say, a rope.
In fact you can find "peak" for "pique" here in the Eggcorn Database. A search didn't turn up "tow the line," but I've seen it mentioned often as an example of an eggcorn.
I've written before about eggcorns (and mondegreens). Language is fascinating, a continuously changing lanscape shaped by those who use it and try to make sense of it. The grammarian side of me is a bit pinched and school-marmy, yes?
Even as Stephen Fry urges us, "Dive into the open flowing waters [of language] and leave the stagnant canals be," he admits to still wincing over certain uses of language. But I think he's right that we should leave the pedantry behind:
I don’t deny that a small part of me still clings to a ghastly Radio 4/newspaper-letter-writer reader pedantry, but I fight against it in much the same way I try to fight against my gluttony, anger, selfishness and other vices.
Alas, even as I fight against what he calls pedantry, I know that certain punctuation errors (see Apostrophe Abuse and the Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks) and language misuse (as defined by the correctness police) will continue to annoy the hell out of me.
But I can still enjoy eggcorns and mondegreens like anybody else!
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