Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Just finished Martin Toseland’s The Ants Are My Friends: Misheard Lyrics, Malapropisms, Eggcorns, and Other Linguistic Gaffes (hardback in 2007, paperback in 2009), a collection, meant for general readers, of phenomena that should be familiar to readers of this blog and of Language Log: mondegreens, eggcorns, and (non-eggcorn) classical malapropisms. (Key to title: Bob Dylan’s line “the answer, my friends” (is blowin’ in the wind).)

There are many old friends here, attractively presented and engagingly discussed, and Toseland largely avoids the mocking tone that many people talking about mistakes take to those who produce them.

I haven’t checked Toseland’s eggcorn examples to see how many of them are in the Eggcorn Database, or at least mentioned in the Eggcorn Forum, but a quick sampling suggests that most of them have come by the eggcornologists. I have a modest collection of classical malapropisms, but I’m not aiming at completeness there; and though there are some on-line collections of mondegreens, I’m not keeping files on them myself.

Toseland describes himself on his webpage as “an author, ghostwriter, freelance publisher and literary agent”. Ants was the first book published under his own name. It’s now been followed by A Steroid Hit The Earth: A Celebration of Misprints, Typos and Other Howlers (hardback in 2008, paperback in 2009), which I haven’t looked at yet.

Lightweight stuff, but entertaining; it would probably be enjoyed by someone who’s interested in language-y stuff, but not to the point of following linguablogs.

This entry was posted on September 12, 2009 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Books, Errors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.