My dad once gave me a huge eraser with “I never make misteaks” printed on it. We all make misteaks mistakes, don’t we? Mistakes with language provide great entertainment for word lovers. People make so many mistakes in speaking that we can divide them into at least five different categories.

If you search the internet for examples, you will not find necessarily find the same errors in the same categories all the time. It probably doesn’t matter what we call them.

Enjoy!

Mondegreens

Bishop Thomas Percy published a poetry book called Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. It’s not quite what most people in the 20^th century would think of reading to their children, but at least one mother did. Her daughter, who grew up to become the writer Sylvia Wright, especially loved a ballad called “The Bonnie Earl O’Moray,” who was killed before the start of the poem.

Young Sylvia misheard a line in the opening stanza and added an extra corpse:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen

That last line is actually, “and laid him on the green”

In a 1954 essay, Wright proposed mondegreen as the name for such a mishearing and remarked, “they are better than the original.”

Here are a few:

Source	The original words	What people heard instead
“Bad Moon Rising” / Credence Clearwater Revival	There’s a bad moon on the rise.	There’s a bathroom on the right.
“Purple Haze” / Jimi Hendrix	Scuse me while I kiss the sky.	Scuse me while I kiss this guy.
“Living on a Prayer” / Bon Jovi	It doesn’t matter if we make it or not.	It doesn’t matter if we’re naked or not.
“Drift Away” / Dobie Gray	Give me the beat boys and free my soul.	Give me the Beach Boys and free my soul.
“The Twelve Days of Christmas”	Four colley birds	Four calling birds
“Keep Thou My Way” / Fanny Crosby	Gladly the cross I’ll bear	Gladly, the cross-eyed bear

Eggcorns

I have written a whole post about eggcorns, named for one woman’s consistent mispronunciation of “acorns.” They may or may not be real words. If they’re real homonyms found in writing, they are the same as what I have called misused pears in an occasional series on this blog. As far as I’m concerned, ordinary misspellings don’t count as eggcorns, although some lists include them.  Here are some examples I didn’t use before:

• intergrade for integrate
• in the rears for in arrears
• slack thirst for slake thirst
• southmore for sophomore
• preannual for perennial
• giga counter for Geiger counter
• mind grain for migraine
• my as well for might as well
• knotical for nautical
• expotential for exponential
• beyond approach for beyond reproach
• dong for dawn, as in “it donged on me”

Malapropisms

Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The Rivals has a character named Mrs. Malaprop who mangles English every time she opens her mouth. Her name comes from the French “mal à propos,” which means incorrect or impertinent.

Of course, she had no idea she ever said anything wrong.

“Sure, if I reprehend anything in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue and a nice derangement of epitaphs.”

Did she perhaps mean “Sure, if I comprehend anything in this world, it is the use of the vernacular tongue and a nice arrangement of epithets”?

Sheridan didn’t invent the malapropism. In Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, the constable Dogberry announces, “Our watch, sir, have comprehended two auspicious persons” instead of “apprehended two suspicious persons.” It’s surely much older than that.

Numerous authors and comedians have used malapropisms to good effect. But why would they be funny if people didn’t commit them in real conversation?

These days, it’s easy to hear people get their dandruff (dander) up about exuberant (exorbitant) prices or accuse someone of fermenting (fomenting) unrest. Someone declared a musician’s performance floorless instead of flawless. One of my grandmother’s friends wanted Papermate (Coffeemate) for her coffee.

Famous people have uttered such gems as tantrum (tandem) bicycle (Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley), unparalysed (unparalleled) in state history (Texas House Speaker Gib Lewis) or fade into Bolivian (oblivion—boxer Mike Tyson).

True malapropisms usually maintain the same part of speech and the same accentuation as the correct word. The following, then, might not quite count, but it’s too good to omit:

“. . . historians hypnotize that Archimedes’ a great Greek inventor” used solar power. Hypothesize, perhaps? Just like Mrs. Malaprop to reach for an impressive-sounding word and fail.

Spoonerism

Spoonerisms result from transposing sounds in consecutive words. It happens when people get their tang all tungled up, um, tongue all tangled up. Spoonerisms get their name from an Oxford faculty member named William Archibald Spooner.

By all accounts, Spooner frequently said some strange things, but probably not including some of the more elaborate Spoonerisms attributed to him.

In one of my favorites, he supposedly expelled a student saying, “You have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have tasted the whole worm. You must leave Oxford by the next town drain.”

Such long strings probably originated from undergraduate students imitating him. Later in life, he said that the only one he remembered was the hymn title “When kinkering kongs their titles take.”

The following may or may not be authentic:

• You were caught fighting a liar in the quad.
• The Lord is indeed a shoving leopard.
• As you grow older, the weight of rages will press harder and harder on your employer.
• I have a half-warmed fish in my mind.
• He dealt a blushing crow
• Our queer old dean (Queen Victoria)
• It is kisstomary to cuss the bride.

I haven’t been able to find any examples attributed to anyone else, which surprises me. I do recall, however, hearing a long stream of transpositions in a performance the story of Indercella, the pransome hince, and the stugly epp sisters.

Freudian slip

I can remember when it was impossible to pick up a newspaper or magazine without at least one article quoting Sigmund Freud as an expert on the subject. Back then, if anyone made a slip of the tongue, someone was bound to reply, “Freud would understand.”

Then, sometime in the mid 1970s, everyone stopped quoting him.

Freud’s influence on language continues, however. We owe numerous words and expressions to him: ego, libido, death wish, anal retentive, phallic symbol, Oedipus complex, and much more.

A Freudian slip, therefore, is a misstatement attributable to some kind of unconscious or subconscious thought pattern. In the popular imagination, it has to do with sex.

In Freud’s own practice, a woman talking about her changing attraction toward a particular man, said that she never disliked him. She just “never gave him the chance to cuptivate my acquaintance.” Freud wrote that she intended to say “cultivate” but subconsciously thought “captivate.”

Freud insisted that such slips of the tongue expressed thoughts the person didn’t intend to reveal, and that maybe the person had repressed. Suppose a dog named Marcus bit a young boy and the boy eventually forgot all about it. Then, suppose he always drew a blank when trying to remember anyone named Marcus.

Simpler examples would include calling your spouse by the name of your ex or saying mad to meet you instead of glad to meet you.

If someone says breast and the brightest instead of best and the brightest or orgasm instead of organism, “Freud would understand.”  Some Freudian slips may indeed provide a window to unconscious desires and repressions. But everyone misstates themselves. We don’t need to reach for psychoanalytical theory to explain every instance. They can be fun in either case.