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Gathering Eggcorns
How the many near-homophones of English combined with the decline of reading results in marvelous new usages
English is a historically phonetic language. Although US spellings often attempt to remove the endless confusions arising from the fact that written British English is as much a linguistic archeological record as a usable orthographic system, for the most part most people rely on what they hear rather than have reference to a wide mental lexicon in order to make sense of the sounds coming into their ears. Thus old spellings bear little resemblance to modern pronunciations and unless one reads widely, one must guess at spellings. This guessing, combined with imprecise hearing or pronunciation, can lead to neologisms emerging as people try to make sense of what they think they’re hearing.
As English is rich in homophones, it’s not surprising that our attempts to turn sounds into words can lead to many amusing misconceptions. The term “folk etymology” was coined nearly two centuries ago and basically means “people will choose the nearest word in their own limited vocabulary in order to make sense of a novel sound.” So it is that we talk about Jerusalem artichokes: English speakers, upon hearing girasole artichokes, reached for the nearest thing in their memory banks and so even today that’s what we call them…
