Something shouldn't make sense only because the reader is more articulate and intelligent than the writer.

I quite enjoyed the article.

Interesting first example though - in the UK, "mute point" would VERY rarely be used, as the word is pronounced "myoot", not "moot". (At least I assume that's how the US pronounce it - like "pooma" for puma, rather than the UK "pyuma"? - or, come to that, "assoom" rather than "assyoom"?)

Veronica - can you expand? I don't think I understand the point you're trying to make.

I love the article. I'll be looking for eggcorns from now on. So Martin, does that mean that there are no eggcorns in England? I got your point about moot point and I know there are many other words pronounced very differently than standard Americnan dialect, but surely there are still some words that lend themselves to the eggcorn?

I'll have to take issue with you Martin about the 'moot' word. Of course, in your neck of the words it might be pronounced as myoot ie the same as 'mute' (meaning dumb/unable to speak) but I have always heard it as 'moot' to rhyme with toot, flute etc. And it's root does come from the old Anglo-Saxon court the Moot where points of law were discussed.

An eg of merry's 'eggcorns' heard locally is the word muriel (the name) used in place of mural (a wall-painting).

Vee - I entirely agree with you. "Moot" is pronounced "moot". But "mute" is pronounced "myoot". Hence the words are not likely to be confused. But I'm speculating that in the U S of A that the word "mute" is pronounced "moot". Hence the confusion.

(I've just realized I'm sitting next to a Yank at work this week, and I've asked him about the pronunciation of "mute". Guess what - they pronounce it the same as we do! Oh, well, that blows my theory out of the water.)

granjan (nice name! derivation?) - of course there are eggcorns in the UK. It's just I don't think you'd hear "mute point". For example, "free reign" is probably used more regularly than the correct "free rein".

re: mute vs. moot....(trying to redeem my math debacle) it comes more from the fact that most young people are not familiar with the word moot, its meaning, derivation or spelling-they've heard the phrase spoken, but never seen it written-so they go with a word they know and transfer it into the phrase they sort of know.

I had a "knock-down drag out fight" at a party with another teacher over this one:

"wreak havoc" (pronounced reek) vs. "wreck ( rek) havoc"-had to pull out the Webster's to prove that havoc is wreaked...the opposite of the moot/mute thing, he'd seen the phrase written, but never heard it pronounced.

I wonder how many eggcorns are passed down from generation to generation. I know there are certain ones in my family that I've heard all my life.

I think the authors idea of using these to improve proofreading is an interesting idea. I remember English teachers being extremely mean about any grammatical or other error. Being mean did not make me a better writer, it just made me hate English class. Finding ways to make learning fun are more effective than yelling about every little mistake.

And Martin, I am also from the US of A, and I've always heard "mute" pronounced "myoot."

Yes. My theory is well and truly scuppered.

(So why do you in the US do your dooty, go to see a pooma in a zoo and assoom things? Don't bother to answer - that's just the way it is...)

When put on the spot -- like now -- I can never think of good examples, but I'm probably very guilty of committing eggcorns. I lot of it is just mixing up homophones; e.g. phase for faze or vice versa; sieze for cease...

I looked at some of the eggcorns at the Eggcorn Database and nearly fell on the floor laughing at dong for dawn as in
"Then it donged on me, Broadcom is providing the source code, the vendors just add their tweaks and change some logoÂs."And pus jewel as in"my face is sore and i dont like having big pus jewels on my face."I certainly have no room to talk about mistakes or poor proofreading skills, but they are funny so why not laugh at 'em.

Cece, I hear the wreck havoc thing so much that I'm beginning to think it's now almost mainstream.

As an aside here, may I just ask someone from the US how they pronounce the word route meaning a road or the way taken.
In the UK we say 'root' pronouncing it as we would the 'root vegetable' the carrot.

The pronunciation of "route" in the U.S. varies regionally. My route rhymes with out, but many routes rhyme with moot (but not mute). Only occasionally have I heard it rhyme with foot.

Jumping in here: route is pronounced "root" or "rowte" in America and I've never discovered any reason. The same person might easily pronounce the word the two different ways.

mute rhymes with cute, beaut, flute.

moot with root, boot, toot.

route can rhyme with either (eeeeether ot eyether) out, snout or about. Or with moot, root, etc. I hear both. I think I use the OUT sound. When I said them out loud, they both sounded right! Maybe it's my Southern Drawl. I wonder if it's a word that's going through a transitional period here in the US.

While we are talking about this sort of thing....
What is with people asking, "Can you give me advise on....." Or, "I need some advise."

Do advice and advise sound the same in some areas? Or is it just a matter of not knowing which is which?

Get your kicks - on Rowte Sixty-Six!

Naaaaah...

Agnes, it is just lack of spelling skills, I think.

I've just finished a book that used "bale" out. I looked at Encarta, and the definition there of "bail" doesn't mention removing water from a leaking boat. I asoom this means I'm archaic.

I pronounce route either to rhyme with shoot or shout, depending upon what part of the country I'm presently in. I've heard both equally.

I've never understand how "orient" got morphed into "orientated". What was wrong with the original?

Can anyone tell me which is correct: is it "jerry-rigged" or "jury rigged"? (say for a house thrown together haphazardly). I've heard both.

I'm with you on this one. I really don't understand how "orient" became "orientated". And, to be honest, it REALLY REALLY bugs me when people use "orientated" when they really mean "oriented".

As for "jury-rigged" or "jerry-rigged", here's an interesting article I found on the subject.

Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-jur1.htm

I always thought that jury rigged had to do with a temporary fix to a piece of equipment until a permanent repair could be made. I have the feeling that it was of a maritime origin

In case of jerry rigged, was sort of a cheap thing that was done to keep from having to make suitable repair, a patch up job. Duct tape and wire comes to mind.

Mary, in 'English' English we use jury rigged to do with boats/ships. I think it is when for eg a mast/spar breaks and a 'jury' is rigged-up quickly out of what ever timber is to hand.
To describe a badly built house we use the term jerry built.
We also notice that in the US you add lots of extra 'bits' to words . . . but as Frieda says I can never give eg's when I need them!

agnes, I think the advise (verb) and advice (noun) must be a 'sound' thing. In the UK there would be no problem with hearing the difference.

What drives me mad over here (well, one of many things) is the ungrammatical use of the words 'sat' and 'stood'
eg "We were sat down in the park" or " He was stood up in front of us blocking the view." I don't know when large numbers of the population forgot to use 'sitting' and 'standing'.
I have even heard it used on the BBC!

Vee, we don't pronounce advise and advice the same either.

I have a problem with "he was graduated," too, instead of just he graduated.

Using maps and the internet, I design our rowt when taking a trip-today we took root 322.

All day I've been trying to think of true eggcorns. I know I've heard or read a lot of them, but they are much harder to bring to mind that I thought they would be. I did think of one: That's just a pigment of your imagination. I went to the Eggcorn Database to see if they had it and, of course, they do.

Would peak or peek for pique qualify? Probably not, since that's mixing homophones again.

While reading through the entries at the Eggcorn site, I did a double take when I got to behoove:
"It would be who of us all to stand behind our great leader in this tough time of war." and another example:"Elementary school is the grade level in which I will be looking into and I felt that it would be who of me to learn a little about Elementary Schools before I start talking about certain topics like bullying."Oh my! I see it before my eyes but I can't quite believe it.

Vee, I usually think American orthography makes more sense (well, I would, wouldn't I? being an American), but sometimes it is downright schizoid. I don't know why we didn't go whole hog replacing the "buzzed" S-sound with a Z, as we do with, say, analyze and others of that ilk. But, no, there are several words -- such as surprise, advertise, apprise, advise, reprise -- that retain the the S-spelling though we buzz them like a zed. Another screwy American spelling is skeptic.

I'm wondering about those "bits" you say Americans are always adding 'cause it seems to me that we usually lose bits that Brits have kept, such as alumin(i)um and program(me), etc.

Sportswriters have a particular talent for sentences like these:

"His promise to improve day to day remains in tact." (So does he mean it or is he just being polite?)

"The tug of war between offense and defense continued in a stale mate. " (I won't even touch this one.)

Do these qualify as eggcorns? They drive me nuts, whether they qualify or not.

In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, we use both "rowte" and "root" for route. I find I tend to use "rowte" when I'm describing the path we take and "root" when I'm talking about a road number.

"It's because I read for gestalt and not for detail," she cried defensively.

I regret to say I once eggcorned (see how easily I turned it into a verb?) Malvolio's name in a paper on Twelfth Night making it Malviola. The teacher pointed my mistake out to the entire class but then noted that it made a certain sense to put Mal (bad) in front of Viola's name. "Which is probably why I read it that way; I took my Latin seriously at the time," she cried defensively.

I'm sure I'm guilty of many eggcorns. Like the teacher in the article, I'm always amazed when I google something I misspelled or otherwise got completely wrong and still get a gazillion hits.

I think, but I am not sure that around here, we think of the mailman's rowte, the paperboy's rowte, the shortest rawte, but we say root when we speak of a Highway number. Root 66 comes to mind!

"What rawte are you taking?" "I think we will go root 17 to root 30."

I just read a funny line on another forum--"a diluted state of denial." Guess that's better than pure denial?

My grandfather whose origins were in the English countryside around Kent, pronounced route as 'rowt' so this could have been taken to the US in that form.
On a similar subject, what about changed proverbs?
I often hear that the "proof is in the pudding" when I had always understood that the "proof of the pudding is in the eating" which makes sense.

Frieda, I don't think anyone in England has used the term behoove or even behove (as we pronounce it) since about 1722.

Where did you find the sentence that finishes with " . . . bullying"? It would have 'be who of' the person that 'authored' it to reach for a big blue pencil.
US spelling doesn't bother me . . .I can't even do the 'English' type and would have been much more at ease orthographically speaking in the pre-Dr Johnson days when one spelt what one heard spoken and the greater number of spelling variations was a sign of ingenuity.
Just think of the different ways Shakespeare signed his name. If the Bard was able to experiment with his own monika surely we should be allowed a little leeway with something as difficult as antirrhinum ('snapdragon' is much easier).

Re the 'sport' people. There is a commentator on UK TV who will never be allowed to forget using the expression about a football match "This has been a game of two halves."

annpan interesting about how pronounciation of words plus accents/dialect has travelled round the world.
Does anyone really think the English sounded like Americans back in the sixteen hundreds or the Aussie accent comes from the Cockney twang of the first convicts?

Veer said We also notice that in the US you add lots of extra 'bits' to words . . . but as Frieda says I can never give eg's when I need them!.

I can think of one that cracked me up when I lived in the states: burglarize for burgle. To me, having your house burglarized sounds like you're having a burglar installed. Love it.

None of the eggcorns annoy me, by the way, I just find them hilarious; I admire the childlike way of making sense of what you hear. One that comes to mind is It's a doggie dog world, used by someone who'd misheard dog-eat-dog but decided to use it anyway...

Anyanka, from the American side, burgle is very amusing, as it is a back formation of burglar (one who enters a dwelling intent upon theft). It's interesting that when the act of a burglar was verbified, Americans chose to expand burglar to burglarize while Britons chose to shorten it to burgle. But it's not always the case that Americans "add bits" and Brits "subtract," as the example of orient (American) and orientate (British) cited above by someone. There are other examples...maybe someone can come up with some of them.

I use behoove (and it's opposite, "ill behoove") constantly-"It would behoove you to look over the vocab before the test." "It ill-behooves you to moan if you didn't study." Whenever I use a word the class doesn't know, they ask-I train them early-and that word becomes the "word of the day" and they are AMAZED when it appears in something they are reading-and "behoove" is usually the first "word of the day" because I pull it out as soon as possible.
Moot runs a close second. Sometimes I feel like I am the standard-bearer for old-fashioned words-but if they are reading books written more than 10 years ago, they need the appropriate vocabulary.

Like Anyanka, I find these quite amusing. I almost laughed out loud when I saw "burgle" above. I have never heard any American use it. On the other hand, I use "behoove" and even "ill behoove" occasionally and have heard others in the US use it.

On another thread we discussed how some of the earlier British expressions survived only overseas, while they are no longer used in the UK. I can only recall the example of "yonder" used widely in the South, but there were others, particularly those that survived in the southern Appalachian Mountains. (e.g. "where did you say he was going fishing? Down yonder.")

Years ago, when they were trying to telephone someone and could not get them, I've heard folk say: "The lion was busy." ;-)

'Yonder' is a lovely word. Perhaps I could train my daughters to carry it back out into the world (well, East Surrey, anyway).

My favourite ever eggcorn is unfortunately German, so I will bore you with a translated version. Eichhörnchen, frequently sighted in the local parks, are squirrels. When Rhianna was very little and still spoke German to me, she called them Einhörnchen which would translate as 'little unicorn'. I never corrected her... it was too delightful.

my son got his meals and his basketball mixed up, and used to appear in the kitchen in the morning, climb up in his booster seat, and demand his "fastbreak." We loved it.

ccrdmrbks -- your son's "fastbreak" reminds me of my friend's daughter who loved to eat "waterlemon."

If I remember correctly, the dictionary definition of "orientate" is to face eastward. Interesting that it is used instead of the verb "orient" in Britain.

Mute for moot bothers me because it changes the meaning people are trying to convey.

Here on gardenweb someone referred to the neighbors who lived "next store." That one made me shake my head.

My very large and detailed 'English' dictionary says that orient(n) means the east as used 'poetically'.
It goes on to say that the excessive use of orientate or orient and orientation should be avoided by careful users as a backformation. eg an 'orientation course' or 'profit-oriented' and all are something frowned on as jargon.
So what word should we use instead?

anyanka, burglarize is just the sort of word I was trying to think of. How about authorized for 'written a book' and accessorized for overloaded with 'bling'/chandeliers/small fluffy toys . . .or whatever.

How about authorized for 'written a book'...Heh-heh!! Don't think I've ever actually heard or seen that one, but I don't doubt that somebody -- somewhere -- has committed such an atrocity. I agree that there's entirely too much -izing going on in American constructions, but it's a hard habit to break -- and it seems to have caught on with much of the rest of the English-speaking world, too.

Since this conversation seems to have expanded beyond eggcorns to spoonerisms, malaprops, and identifying features of dialects, etc., I wanted to mention the Aussie habit of not only adding y or ie to so many words, but also shortening words and adding an o. I was in Victoria recently and found out that Aussie ambulances are "ambos" and compensation is "compo." Vee, you asked about whether the Australian dialects were influenced by Cockney, so do you know if this is common in Cockney, too? I tried -- tactfully -- to broach the subject of the origins of the Australian speech sounds. The people I was around were wonderful hosts and delightful in so many ways; but they seemed to be a bit defensive and annoyed that I was interested, though they were willing enough to analyze my American speech peculiarities.

Saw one today. At the beginning of the local news, it announced at the bottom of the screen: "Grizzly Murder". I knew they had a problem with black bears in New Jersey, but I didn't know grizzlies had spread this far east.

I am Swedish and I don't quite understand the difference between the term eggcorn and the more common term folk etymology? This kind of transformation of words to make them into better understood words and phrases is surely common in all languages. It may be more common in English because of the difficult spelling conventions.

A mistake I don't understand is a phrase as "Who would of thought it?" I realize that it must be derived from the contraction "would've" but what do people think they have written when they use "of" for "have"?

Mariannese,

You are right, they do seem to be related. But I think an eggcorn is usually an unintentional mutilation of a well-known phrase, often because the writer has heard the phrase, but never seen it printed. Folk etymology seems to be more about the evolution of individual words through language adaptations.
The mistake you reference in your second question comes, I believe, from American pronunciation. When we say "Would've" it sounds like "Would of" and so the ear directs the pen.

I have a friend you believes that Shakespeare said:

"To thy known self be true." !!

And, you know......even as written, it does offer a certain quirky wisdom.

Thanks for that eggcorn link.....it helped me to be less rigid about these things and perhaps see them as "goofy goofs" instead of egregious errors!

Well, this isn't an eggcorn but it reminds me of a story that a former history prof told me. Apparently, when marking final exams for a survey course in European history, he and his colleagues kept encountering the term "cat-horse". Of course they were quite puzzled by this.

Upon further reflection, they realized that the term was used in conjunction with a name -- Louis, as in "Louis the cat-horse". They finally realized that when students were taking notes, they were writing the words down phonetically. Louis the cat-horse was, in reality, Louis XIV! Problem was, the professor kept referring to good ol' Louis XIV as Louis Quatorze (Louis Fourteen in French). The students, not realizing that the prof was using a French term, thought that it was a TITLE -- Louis the Cat-Horse! Yes, it would have helped if the students actually read the textbook ....

From then on, profs made sure to explicitly mention when they were using foreign terms in class.....

Mariannese, I agree with Cece (ccrdmrbks) that the would of error is based on pronunciation. Some of the mispronunciations of that type have become so common that they have entered the mainstream, at least in American speech and writing, though they are not considered standard. We often say: "I sort of understood the question" or "I kind of misplaced my shoes." Like many idioms, they don't make much literal sense, but people know what is meant by process of familiarity. The distinction is gradually lost and many people don't stop to think of the formal, proper way to write the phrase; and besides that, if they are writing informally, they don't want the proper phrasing anyway.

My husband and I used to argue about the song "The Weight" performed by The Band. He thought the guy was singing "Take the load off Fanny" while I was pretty sure it was "Take the load off Annie"; but there was no way to be sure until we saw the lyrics printed out.

I meant to note in my above posting that sort of and kind of have further "degraded" in American speech to sorta and kinda, because when we are lazy that's how we pronounce them.

dynomutt, that's a funny story about Louis Quatorze. It reminds me of school, when I and my classmates called Don Quixote "Donkey Hoot" because that's the way our teacher's pronunciation sounded to us. Some poor kid even spelt it that way on a test, to his chagrin.