eggcorns & mondegreens & dialogue
There is an interesting post on Language Log (one of a series of posts in various places) on what the LL folks are calling 'eggcorns'. 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 ...").
In his LL post, Mark Liberman quotes Geoff Pullum on eggcorns (also on Language Log):
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?')
It's usually a bad idea to give in to the impulse to use eggcorns in dialogue, because mostly they will come across as contrived or mawkish. I've got an example I'm hesitating to produce. It's in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible; I like Barbara Kingsolver's work and I don't want to pick at this one infelicity, but it's there in a letter written by a young girl: an eggcorn that (for me) disrupted the narrative flow completely. The problem is, I think, that the eggcorn draws attention to itself and away from the story and the character. Thus I add eggcorns to my list of things to avoid in writing dialogue:
adverbs;
dialectal (or supposedly dialectal) spellings;
info-dumping;
anachronisms;
the overuse of quotation marks and (dog forbid) exclamation points; and
eggcorns and mondegreens.