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Living in a Multilingual World
The one about acorns, or rather, eggcorns
For many years I dampened “squid” and gave free “reign” to my imagination. Helped by a transatlantic accent (before it changed to a proper London geezer’s pronunciation) and the familiar pattern of stress-timed words in the English language, my malapropisms went undetected for a long time.
Until one day, when I wrote an e-mail to a colleague in which I discussed an event we’d both been to. “Well, that was a bit of a damp squid, wasn’t it?” I think I heard his laughter down the hall before I saw his face. He turned up at my office, red-faced, and clutching his sides. “Mario”, he said, “what’s a squid got to do with things below par?”
I dried up my poor squid there and then and put it aside forever. I still miss it, though. But in its place, I began to use the correct term “squib.”
This kind of solecism is known as an “eggcorn”. It’s a linguistic phenomenon in which a word or phrase is altered and changed for another one that sounds similar and has been misheard or misinterpreted. In the case of “eggcorn”, the right word would be “acorn”.
With forty-four phonemes to twenty-six letters, the English language is a minefield of eggcorn…
