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old eggcorns & characters writing letters
Sometime ago I posted about eggcorns and mondegreens, and I'm going to recycle bits of that post here.
I guess the easiest way to define 'eggcorn' might be simply: a reinterpretation of any given word that is first heard and assimilated on the basis of the spoken language alone. "Eggcorn" for "acorn" is an example; "wheelbarrel" for "wheelbarrow" is another. This is related, of course, to the mondegreen phenomenon where whole phrases are misheard and recast ("... and deliver us some e-mail ..." instead of "... and deliver us from evil ...").
Mark Liberman from Language Log quotes Geoff Pullum on eggcorns:
It would be so easy to dismiss eggcorns as signs of illiteracy and stupidity, but they are nothing of the sort. They are imaginative attempts at relating something heard to lexical material already known. One could say that people should look things up in dictionaries, but what should they look up? If you look up eggcorn you'll find it isn't there. Now what? And you can't look up everything; sometimes you think you know what you just heard and you don't need to look it up.
I find that in writing dialogue, I am sometimes tempted to use eggcorns. There is something endearing about them. My father, whose first language was Italian, had a lot of eggcorns: Mr. Lanious for 'miscelleanous' as in I put aside forty dollars for Mr. Lanious this month; doggydog for 'dog eat dog' as in It's a doggydog work out there, you better watch out. I'm telling you. Children produce a lot of eggcorns in the process of language acquisition, and again when they are taught to recite prayers, songs or other material by rote without explanation of meanings that might be beyond them. ('Jose, can you see?' for 'Oh say can you see?')
You run into eggcorns everywhere. Just yesterday I ran into an interesting one. I was reading antebellum letters on the subject of slavery, and I came across this: "a word to the wise is a nuft."
That is certainly an eggcorn.
I use letters a lot in my novels. Letters and newspaper ads and other bits and pieces that bring the time and place more into focus. I love the idea of these supplements to the narrative being lifted out of the novel. Imagine this: the dozen or so letters from one character to another are handwritten on aged paper, folded as was common in the early 1800s, and stuck in the pages of the novel to be unfolded and read when you come to that part of the story. The newspaper articles and ads also printed on newsstock and tucked into the pages at the right spot.
This is, of course, a fantasy of mine. I don't know how I'd ever talk my publisher into something that would clearly be a huge expense, and I also am not sure how it would go over with the readers. Maybe I'm in the minority on this one. Maybe only those of us who adore the Jolly Postman books would take note.
The Jolly Postman, in case you have not had the joy, is a book for children (one of a series of books, actually) in which some of the pages have been turned into envelopes, and inside the envelopes are letters to take out and read. For example, from Little Red Riding Hood's lawyers to the Big Bad Wolf, demanding that he cease and desist.
My point (and I do have one) is that for me personally it's easy to get caught up in the artifacts. I love the idea of a multimedia novel, but the closest I can get is to give the readers letters and newspaper bits and broadsides in the traditionally typeset way.
But here's the issue: when one character writes to another and I include the letter in the novel, I face the fact that people wrote differently in 1814. Spelling, punctuation, capitalization, all these things were more highly variable than they are now, in the age of dictionaries and the Punctuation Police. So do I reproduce letters exactly, or do I recast them for a modern audience?
I recast them, mostly. It's what feels right to do, because otherwise the content of the letter becomes less important than the way it's presented. If, for example, a character writes this:
We are all Wel and in high good Spirits since News of the end of the War reached us. Gabriel continues coffing despite my Best efforts but then the child won't keep a Hatt on his Head for Love or Mony. In his case a Word to the Wise is most certainly not a Nuft.
The fictive trance that is so important to keeping the reader with the novel will be disrupted. What to us looks like odd spelling and punctuation and the eggcorn "a Nuft" will strike most readers as funny, and they'll step back from the story.
So to my list of things to avoid in the way characters express themselves in dialogue and writing:
adverbs;
dialectal (or supposedly dialectal) spellings;
info-dumping;
anachronisms;
the overuse of quotation marks and (dog forbid) exclamation points;
eggcorns and mondegreens;
contemporaneous spellings and punctuation.
November 27, 2005 09:31 AM
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Comments
Speaking of the Star Spangled Banner- it wasn't until I was in high school that I figured out it's not "... in the donzerly light..." Up to that point, I thought it was a reindeer reference.
Posted by: sara g at November 27, 2005 09:45 AM
Children are a great source of eggcorns. Being a preschool teacher I hear them often. The most recent example was a student listening to the disney song "It's a Small World Afterall", and singing enthusiastically, "it's a small world at the mall."
Posted by: Dana at November 27, 2005 11:46 AM
Right now, it probably does feel like a small world at the mall, or at least one of very close quarters. ;-)
I love the idea of coming across letters tucked into the pages of a novel, written in cursive writing, on old parchment paper. However, I have these visions of magazines with their cards and crap that go fluttering to the ground when you turn them the wrong way and the pages flap open. I guess the way it is handled in The Jolly Postman would work very nicely. It sounds like a rather funny children's book, by the way.
I actually like a few oddly spelled words or capitalization when I read the letters because they do seem to fit the period better. However, too much certainly becomes distracting.
I always liked the way you opened Lake In the Clouds with the advertisements from New York. It definitely set the tone and gave a nice foreshadowing of what was to come. I also would agree that the more the typesetting looks like it came from a real newspaper the more I feel like I'm being transported through time.
Posted by: Danielle at November 27, 2005 12:09 PM
Oh I love The Jolly Postman! I picked up an intact copy at a used book sale and have been reading it to my son for the last 3 years. When we first started reading it together, he was charmed by the envelopes and letters and lovely illustrations, but he didn't have the foggiest who all the fairy tale character actually were. Now that he's 5 and we've started reading some of the "classics" he's getting the jokes at a deeper level. And by some miracle, we haven't lost one letter.
I'm glad you don't go the multi-media route in presenting letters in your novels (the letters are clearly in each character's voice and style and that's enough for me)--I'd find lots of bells and whistles distracting. They are great for a children's book, but what makes a good picture book and what makes a good adult novel are not always the same (of course now I'm thinking about what does remain consistent across the two genres...)
Posted by: Kathryn Remen-Wait at November 27, 2005 04:34 PM
I think it's a wonderful idea to stick actual letters and newspaper clippings in a novel! I can see how it would be difficult to persuade "the powers that be" to allow it though.
Posted by: Kylie at November 27, 2005 08:17 PM
I think a good use of an eggcorn in fiction is in Where the Heart Is, when Novalee says that she wouldn't "lick a gift horse in the mouth." It made me laugh out loud because of the imagery, but it also gave me a sense of who the character was.
And I agree with Danielle - I really like the runaway slave ads at the beginning of Lake in the Clouds. It definitely dropped me immediately into that time and place.
Posted by: sarandipity at November 28, 2005 01:18 PM
From the tiny eggcorn may one day grow the majestic, towering okie. It buggers the imagination!
Posted by: flamingbanjo at November 28, 2005 01:38 PM
It buggers the imagination....
snort. giggle.
I'm glad people like the ads in Lake in the Clouds. I had a really interesting time researching and writing them.
Posted by: Sara Donati at November 28, 2005 06:49 PM