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Bonus 88: Linguistic mixups - spoonerisms, mondegreens, and eggcorns
Have you ever misheard a song lyric like "got a long list of ex-lovers" as "Starbucks lovers"? Or maybe you've swapped some sounds around like "well-boiled icicle" for "well-oiled bicycle" or seen Alzheimer's Disease referred to by the more sensical, similar-sounding name "Old-timer's Disease". Mixups like these are not only fun to share examples of, but they also tell us things about how language works in our brains.
In this bonus episode of (ahem) Thing-Lusiasm, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about three of our favourite kinds of linguistic mixups: spoonerisms, mondegreens, and eggcorns. We talk about William Spooner, the Oxford prof from the 1800s that many spoonerisms are (falsely) attributed to, Lauren's very Australian 90s picture book of spoonerisms, the Scottish song "The Bonny Earl of Moray" which gave rise to the term mondegreen, why there are so many more mondegreens in older pop songs and folk songs than there are now, and how eggcorn is a double eggcorn (a mis-parsing of acorn, which itself is an eggcorn of oak-corn for akern). Listen to this episode about our favourite kinds of linguistic mixups, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.
