A Pedant’s Guide to Linguistic Mistakes

Language is a funny thing. It only works when everyone is on the same page, but it’s so large that actually getting everyone in compliance would be an impossible task even if we all agreed to it. Loan words slip in, meanings change, euphemisms become canonized, words and phrases undergo reanalysis, reinterpretation, rebracketing, it’s a big giant mess.

But people do make mistakes, deviations from the norm that are “wrong” because everyone agrees that they’re wrong. If we didn’t agree they were wrong, or they were used by a cluster of people, we would call them differences in vernacular or dialect.

No, what we’re here to talk about is when people are wrong enough that you can correct them on it, and I’m taking the historical approach here, rather than the definitional one, though this will be in the form of a glossary.

• catachresis – This is generally considered to be a catch-all term, with one definition being “the use of a word in a way that is not correct”. The most common variant definitions are “use of a forced and especially paradoxical figure of speech” and “mixed metaphor”, either in error or for rhetorical effect. I think here we see some of what marks the language of language mistakes: over-broad definitions, lots of vibes, and no one agreeing quite what the specifics are. The word dates to the 1580s. One of the classic examples of the “mixed metaphor” sense is “blind mouths” from Milton’s “Lycidas”, another is “take arms against a sea of troubles” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, both presumably for poetic effect.
• mondegreen – This is when you mishear something and repeat back the incorrect thing. It was coined in 1954 by Sylvia Wright, you can read her piece in Harper’s here. She says in the essay, “The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original.” Sadly, no one includes the “better than the original” part of this in their definition. Instead, they say that this is an error that comes from mishearing a song or poem, better or not. Some only say “especially” from a song or poem, allowing that a mondegreen might be any kind of error produced from mishearing. Extremely common with song lyrics.
• malapropism – A malapropism is named after Mrs. Malaprop from the 1775 play The Rivals, you can read it here. This is a comedy of manners, and Mrs. Malaprop’s joke is that she uses a bunch of words wrong while making an effort to appear educated and upper class, a very classic trope from before this play was written. The self-satisfied character of Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing was the go-to before Mrs. Malaprop, and these kinds of errors were called “dogberries” or “dogberryisms” before that. In 1858 there was a play Our American Cousin, with the character of Dundreary, and for a time these were called “dundrearyisms”, but this didn’t stick. (An interesting thing about class in these plays is that sometimes it’s an upper class person being a twit, which is funny, and other times it’s a lower person with pretensions to a higher class they clearly don’t belong to, which is funny.) One of the key features of a malapropism is that it’s exaggerated, ridiculous, or foolish, especially if it makes the person saying it look like a pompous idiot. That said, the word has been around for about 250 years, and it’s drifted into meaning “an error”, depending on which dictionary you read. Some emphasize the ridiculousness, some the pomposity and pretense to education, some seem to think “an error” is enough. Before you use the word “malapropism”, watch a performance of The Rivals and then think to yourself “is this something that Mrs. Malaprop would say?”
• metathesis – This is when you mixed up two parts of a word. The most common one I know of is when a child says “pasghetti”. This is generally a speech error, so not something you need to worry too much about in text. The one I think irritates people most is “nucular” instead of “nuclear”, unless we’re going to talk about racially charged ones, in which case the one that annoys people most is probably “aks” for “ask”. The word metathesis dates to the 1570s, comes from Greek.
• barbarism – This one has no currently accepted meaning in linguistics, but it used to mean the mixing of languages, and has meant a variety of things over the course of approximately 1700 years, and no one really uses it now. If you wanted to use it in the classic sense, you would say that someone using a Spanish loanword is engaging in barbarism. Which sounds pretty racist. Probably avoid this one.
• solecism – A grammatical mistake, like using “between you and I” instead of “between you and me”. Funny enough, the word traces back to Σόλοι (Sóloi), an Ancient Greek colony where they spoke a “corrupted” dialect of Attic Greek. Crazy how millennia old geographical prejudice gets invisibly woven into our language.
• vulgarism – This is when you make an “error” that’s really just lower class speech. It’s different from vulgarity, but if you use this word outside an academic context, or maybe even within it, expect trouble. Best examples are probably “ain’t” and “y’all”. I cannot imagine correcting anyone on either of those, but it’s not always so clear cut.
• hypercorrection – This is an error made while attempting to avoid errors. Someone corrects you on “whom” instead of “who” so you start using “whom” everywhere without understanding the rule (it’s that “who” is a subject pronoun and “whom” is an object pronoun). One that English speakers make with Spanish loan words is pronouncing “habanero” as “habañero” since they’ve been taught Spanish loan words have the “ñ” sound.
• mumpsimus – An error that’s clung to. The apocryphal story is that a poorly educated priest was giving Mass and said “mumpsimus” rather than “sumpsimus”, then kept doing that even after being told he was wrong. This story was told to make a point about obstinate refusal, which is what marks this. Comes from 1510s, but the word itself is a nonsense word, probably meant to be a mishearing. (Note: I have also seen this used for any person who persists in an error after being corrected, but this seems less common.)
• sumpsimus – Coined in opposition to mumpsimus, this is when you use a word correctly in defiance or replacement of a popular or traditional (but incorrect) word. The pedant will often cling to old definitions even as the language shifts, and defend this even though they’re in the minority. That’s sumpsimus. It’s unclear to me whether this is meant to be laudatory.
• folk etymology – Folk etymology is also called reanalysis, and happens when unfamiliar words are replaced with familiar ones. It’s not supposed to mean “made up etymology” by analogy with “folk tale”, but I’ve seen “folk etymology” used that way a lot, and linguists sure seem to have bungled this one. You’d think they would know better. My favorite example is “shamefaced”, which comes from “shamefast”, meaning “fixed firmly by shame”. People “decided” that “shame on the face” made more sense, so the expression changed. Is this “an error”? Only if few enough people use it. If you used “shamefast”, you’d get laughed at, ha ha.
• eggcorn – This is an error made through mishearing or misapplication that alters meaning. This is the most recent term on this list. It’s from 2003! You can read the post here, arguing that it’s a distinct thing. I kind of disagree with the definitions there, and part of the argument put forward is that an eggcorn should involve homonyms, which in practice is not how the word “eggcorn” is now used. Some definitions mention that this needs to be a single person’s mistake, otherwise it’s just a folk etymology, so perhaps we could say that an eggcorn is failed or nascent folk etymology. Funny enough, the OED first definition of “eggcorn” is “acorn”, citing 1844 as its date of origin, and actually, if you use Google’s n-gram viewer, you can see that “eggcorn” shows up (presumably in error) pretty frequently.
• spoonerism – An error, usually verbal, where you transpose the sounds. There was an Oxford don and priest, William Archibald Spooner, for whom these are named. He did it a lot, and everyone was very affectionate about it. Dates to 1900.
• kniferism and forkerism – Alright, look, these aren’t real, but they were made up by Douglas Hofstadter, so I’m including them. If a spoonerism is when you switch initial sounds (this is in contention), a kniferism is when you switch middle sounds, and a forkerism is when you switch ending sounds. He also coined “sporkerism” and “foonerism”, which require recombination. These are nonce words, don’t actually use them, Hofstadter was doing a bit.
• nonce word – A word made up for an occasion or “for the nonce”. Not actually an error, usually, just someone making a new word to express something and be promptly thrown away. Sometimes it’s got some etymological suggestion to it, but sometimes it doesn’t. A particularly famous example is from the play Our American Cousin, the second time it’s shown up here, strangely enough. The line “you sockdologizing old man-trap” was the biggest laugh in the whole play, which is why John Wilkes Booth chose that moment to shoot Abraham Lincoln.

Alright, that was my fun little guide, sorry to end on an assassination joke.