eggcorns, mondegreens, and re-analyses

[trochee]

Eggcorn sighting: "Lo for I shall reign down on them with great wrath and furious anger." A rather-modified version of something inspired by blackwingedboy.

Mondegreen sighting: "In the winter we can build a snowman, until the alligators knock him down". Thanks to beckyb for spotting this; I just found it elsewhere on Snopes, so it's a known mondegreen.

Also an interesting mis-analysis, spotted by JM in the department: "throw me the algene bottle!", presumably from an algene bottle, on analogy with the etymology of apron, which the OED says "In Eng., initial n has been lost by corruption of a napron to an apron." I love that the OED calls this "corruption".

Comments

[xaosenkosmos.livejournal.com]

the etymology of apron

I Did Not Know That. Webster's 1913 doesn't even include "napron". Crazy.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

Webster's 1913 doesn't even include "napron"

that's probably because the change napron => apron occurred in the second half of the 16th century, according to the quotations provided by the OED. (1542: sighted as "napron", 1569-1598: sighted as "apron".)

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

What's odd about calling it corruption?

[trochee.livejournal.com]

"corruption" sounds so dirty and judgmental. Contempo linguists would say "reanalysis", and I'm inclined to agree. The phrase "corruption" follows the myth of the degraded, fallen language.

Because we all know back in the day English was pure and clean as the driven snow. :/

[solri.livejournal.com]

While investigating the brouhaha following in the wake of the film about Kinsey, I found one site describe him as an etymologist who studied wasps before he became a sexologist. Presumably he was researching the origins of words in waspish.

[ex-caracola454.livejournal.com]

Or my favorite, "nickname" from "an ickname" (German ich name

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

I thought it was an ekename?

[ex-caracola454.livejournal.com]

That might be so -- I learned it phonetically and was told it came from "I name", so I assumed the spelling was the same as "I" in German (ich).
In any case, /ik/!

[trochee.livejournal.com]

and, rereading my own post, we might expect to see "nanalogy" if that word gets popular enough. ("it's a nanalogy to Sartre's No Exit.")

[http://users.livejournal.com/_dkg_/]

Your proposed corruption couldn't possibly happen, since nanalogy is already a well-used term describing the study of grandmothers.