Bone Constrictors and Witchy Boards: The Hunt for the Hundred Best Eggcorns in the English Language

By Kem Luther

The word eggcorn was coined in 2003 on Language Log, an online linguistics forum. Over the next several years, an intense search by language amateurs and professionals turned up thousands of candidate eggcorns. The popularity of the term continued to spread and in 2010 the term "eggcorn" made it into a major dictionary. Each year numerous articles dedicated to this neologism continue to appear in major magazines and newspapers.Eggcorns, says the author, are "semantically motivated soundalikes," jury-rigged words that replace legitimate words with the help of parallel meanings and sounds. These vocabulary intruders include such novel terms as "fair's wheel," "pinecomb," "witchy board," "dietbetes," "blastfumy," and "bodyhouse." Now, in the first book devoted exclusively to this neologism and its development, the author takes readers on a field study of the best eggcorns to emerge from the first twelve years of The Great Eggcorn Hunt. Among the more than six hundred eggcorns described in the book are the author's boxed selections for English's top hundred, the best of the best. Some are poignant, others charming. Several are funny enough to damage weak ribs.The book prepares the reader for the field study by listing the characteristics of eggcorns and separating them from their close cousins, such errors as malaprops, mondegreens, folk etymologies, and Freudian slips. The definition is then carried into the domain of Big Words (massive collections of text such as the World Wide Web and Google Books) in search of the best eggcorns. The book surveys the fields of medicine, cuisine, religion, sport, technology, and literature. Chapters are devoted to eggcorns triggered by foreign words entering English and to NSFW eggcorns. In the final section, the field study turns to linguistics, probing its ideas to see what they can tell us about the mechanisms that underlie eggcorns. The author ends the book on a personal note, exploring attempts to automate the hunt for eggcorns and pondering how we could troll lexical dark matter to find more English eggcorns.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1980810745
• ISBN13: 9781980810742
• Release Date: May 2018
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 330 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.0"