Procrastadabbler

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education alerted me to the Eggcorn Database. Eggcorns are those errors in language use that make some sense if you think about it. For example, one of my neighbors used to talk about someone being full of vin and vinegar. I think she mean vim and vigor. But her usage makes sense. Vin is french for wine. Vinegar is made from wine. Both are consumables. Vim means energy and vigor means health and strength which I suppose could come from wine and vinegar.

An eggcorn, the authors of the database write, are creative efforts to fit something one hears into existing lexical and orthographic knowledge.

Which supports my longstanding argument (learned from my writing mentor Patricia as well as the scholar Mina Shaughnessy), errors have meaning and as writing instructors we would do well to explore the reasons for those errors with our students rather than simply pointing them out.