A Word, Please: An eggcorn is also known as a mondegreen
When enough people use a word wrong, eventually it becomes right. That’s how every word in the language came to be. People started using a word differently than before (read: wrong) and it caught on and at one point started being right.
How do you know it’s right? Well, most of us defer to dictionaries, which are really just tallies of how you and I decide words should be used.
So all the fussing and nitpicking you hear about whether you can use “nauseous” to mean “nauseated” and “among” to mean “between” needn’t concern you too much. If the usage is standard, it’s either officially correct or soon will be.
Figures of speech — expressions like “spitting image” and “all intensive purposes” at “at your beckon call” — are different. Dictionaries don’t weigh in much on whether or when misuses of these terms become correct. So, unlike all those single-word nitpicks you hear, multiword figures of speech really do require caution.
Take “spitting image,” for example. It’s common for people to say that a son is the spitting image of his father. But actually, the term they probably wanted was “spit and image.” According to Garner’s Modern American Usage, the original term is a biblical reference about God making Adam from clay that, in turn, was made from dust and spit.
You probably already know about “for all intensive purposes.” The expression is really “for all intents and purposes.” Though it’s easy to understand why people mishear this one.
To say someone is at your “beckon call” is another error, or, as some call it, a mondegreen. A mondegreen is any misheard expression, lyric, catchphrase or slogan. The name itself is a mondegreen.
It’s related to the concept of “eggcorns,” which are also misheard terms, including one derived from “acorn.” The name mondegreen comes from a misheard lyric from the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Moray.” In the song are the words “laid him on the green,” which people famously misheard as “laid him mondegreen.”
As for “beckon call,” you probably want “beck and call.” A beck is a summoning gesture, and, yes, it’s related to “beckon.” Here’s Garner’s: “‘Beckon call’ is an understandable guess at the phrase, since one would naturally call out to beckon someone. And ‘beckon’ is a more familiar term than its shorter sibling ‘beck.’”
“All told” doesn’t pose a problem for most users. It’s rare to get this wrong. It means roughly the same thing as “all said and done,” meaning once you have the whole story, something becomes clear. But there is a myth circulating out there — one I, myself, briefly fell for — that the correct form is “all tolled,” meaning all counted. Not so. “All told” is the original and proper form.
Liars are often bold. But their faces aren’t. So a “bold-faced liar” is the misheard form of the original term “bald-faced liar.” Bald-faced means brazen, obvious and shameless — as many liars are.
“Pawn off” is an interesting mishearing of “palm off.” The original term with “palm” means to pass something off to some unwitting person — a usage Merriam Webster’s says is probably a reference to cheating at cards or sleight-of-hand tricks. Again, it’s easy to see where this one went awry. Pawn shops are at least as prevalent in the modern consciousness as card cheats.
If you say that two things are really “one in the same,” you probably mean that they’re “one and the same.” And if you’re waiting for someone with “baited breath,” you might be inadvertently conjuring thoughts of worms and chum: The term is actually “bated breath,” whose first word is related to “abate,” meaning, basically, to stop.
JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at [email protected].