It’s Friday night and Eddie and his friends are out to dinner at a renowned steakhouse. Eddie places his order, the waiter says “Very good, sir” with a slight smirk, and all of Eddie’s friends have suddenly gone quiet. There’s a pregnant pause as his friends look at one another, smiles growing on their faces. Eddie looks around the table, bewildered. He can sense that laughter is bubbling under the surface, but he has no idea why.
His friend Christine asks him, “Eddie, how did you tell the waiter you wanted your steak?”
“Meaty and rare.”
Fighting a giggle, she asks, โAnd what kind of steak did you get?”
“The flaming young.”
The group erupts in uproarious laughter and dear, sweet Eddie has just bumbled his way into linguistic infamy with both an eggcorn and a malapropism.
What Exactly is an Eggcorn?
An eggcorn is a linguistic misstep in which a person incorrectly uses a word or phrase by substituting a somewhat logical replacement. For example, “stand at a tension” is an eggcorn for “stand at attention.” It’s incorrect – there’s no question about that – but it’s understandable why someone could think that standing rigidly in a high-stress situation would be referred to as “standing at a tension.”
An eggcorn doesn’t have to make perfect sense, but it should be somewhat logical and try to convey the same meaning. And while an eggcorn is typically laughed about and seen as a sort of intellectual faux pas, good eggcorns actually show a bit of ingenuity on the part of the speaker and demonstrate a passable effort to recreate what they thought they’d heard in a logical way. That’s why someone saying they’re listening to music on their “hearbuds” is an eggcorn. Technically they are hearing music on buds, so it’s a forgivable misunderstanding.
Eggcorns versus Malapropisms
Eggcorns differ from malapropisms in that a malapropism is a more egregious blunder that makes no sense whatsoever. Both types of slip-ups will likely result in a chuckle, but eggcorns have an innocent sort of charm to them, like when a child thinks the elderly get “old-timer’s disease” instead of Alzheimer’s. A malapropism lacks that charm (and any sort of logic) and involves saying things like “Bone apple tea” instead of ” Bon appรฉtit,” or talking about the rise of the “Gazpacho police” rather than the “Gestapo police.”
Mondegreens
A third category of phonological mistakes features what are known as mondegreens, which are commonly misunderstood song lyrics. The late โ70s and early โ80s era of music famously produced a number of these common mix-ups, including punk hits like the Clash’s “Rock the Cat’s Box” and the Ramones’ “I Want a Piece of Bacon,” plus Pat Benatar’s classic rock hit “Hit Me with your Pet Shark.” More modern examples include Calvin Harris singing about “When I met you in the sauna” and the Twenty One Pilots’ verse “All my friends are eating steak and snow.”
Good Grammar Ain’t Easy
Poor Eddie’s bungled steak order sheds a bit of light on the fascinating world of linguistic mishaps, where eggcorns, malapropisms, and mondegreens provide glimpses into the human mind’s intricate (and occasionally incorrect) processing of language. Our ears and brains do their best to make sense of the information at hand, sometimes resulting in humorous missteps. So pay careful attention to what you say, or you might choke on your words and need the Heimlich remover.
