Learning a new language can be very hard, we all know that. And tricky. But even learning your mother tongue doesn’t always go straight well. Spelling is anything but easy. And if even great and famous writers sometimes stumble, guess how easy it is for “ordinary” people to do so.
And that is when you experience an eggcorn moment. Ever heard about it?
An eggcorn, in linguistics, is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word/phrase for a word or words that sound similar, if not identical, in the speaker’s dialect. So you may find yourself writing “on the spurt of the moment I refused that job“, when you should have written “on the spur…”, instead. At least that’s a thorn in my side. And it gets worse when we’re dealing with foreign words. This is the case of cross-language eggcorns. So you might have heard people at the restaurant asking for “italian ontrays”. The imagery seems clear enough: entrees are often brought to diners on trays, so you might well think this was the reason for the name. Or, at least, I think so.
Here is an interesting article on famous eggcorn moments. So stop feeling stupid, if even New York Times makes mistakes, why can’t we?
By Sabina Grixoni
Editor and Social Media Strategist
Communication Trainee at TermCoord