More on Erart’s ‘Um…’
If you were to guess the etymology of the word malapropism, it would make sense to believe that it’s a scientific term taken from “mal,” (bad, wrong, evil) and “apropos” — that is, an inappropriate term, or “the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one.”
In fact, the word comes from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play, The Rivals. While Sheridan was playing off the French term, mal à propos, his slippery-tongued character ultimately gave birth to a high-profile linguistic topic of study.
There’s a specific type of malapropism, appropriately known as an eggcorn, that Michael Erart’s Um… explains beautifully:
An eggcorn is “a word is mispronounced or misheard once. Then an individual continues to use the wrong form, insisting it’s correct and often inventing little stories — what linguists call ‘folk etymologies’ — to justify them. One reason classical malapropisms persist in a person’s vocabulary is that one can conceive how, even in the incorrect form, the badly-chosen words make sense”.
“Eggcorn” does, after all, sound like acorn, and an acorn is, after all, kind of shaped like an egg. “Exercise regiment” sounds a lot more disciplined and hard-core than “exercise regimen,” and “for all intensive purposes” technically makes just as much sense as “for all intents and purposes.”
Erarts gathers eggcorns from a few different places, including linguist Arnold Zwicky’s languagelog.com (the site that coined the term) and the official eggcorn archive. Check them out for more examples of Mrs. Malaprop’s progeny.
