The Gnostic Heresys would have us believe that this physical world that our fleshly forms inhabit is the creation not of a Divine Architect following some Holy Blueprints but that of the Demiurge, a blind idiot godling, stumbling in the chaos of unformed matter, strewing bits and pieces haphazardly until our universe took shape amongst the ensuing clumps. While the ontological regard of this concept remains debatable, it is plainly apparent to those with the eyes to see that among many in this world, Con-Fusion is the dominant ethos. It is in the interest of soothing this contagion of Con-Fusion that this very Informative Web-Log was formed, and thus to today's lesson: The Difference Between (and illuminating examples of) Mondegreen, Soramimi, Eggcorn, and Catachresis.
The Mondegreen is a misinterpretation of a phrase due to homophony that lends a different meaning to the general context of said phrase. The appellation comes from Sylvia Wright, who when young mis heard the last line of "The Bonny Earl O'Moray" in the following manner:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl O' Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen,
when in actuality the last line is "And Laid Him on the Green." Another famous (yet fictional) example is Holden Caulfield mis hearing a lyric from a musical version of "Coming Through the Rye" as "Gin a body catch a body/ comin through the rye." From folk collections we have examples of people "drinking themselves into Bolivia" living in a "doggy-dog world" who are "like sheep that pass in the night." The most well known examples would have to be from popular music, but as "Excuse me as I kiss this guy" and "There's a bathroom on the right" are fairly exhausted by now, we shall move onto another subject.
The Soramimi is similar to the mondegreen in that homophony results in re-interpretation, but in this case the re-interpretation is done in a different language. The term itself comes from the Nipponese, who have popular cultural institutions devoted to deriving Soramimi from English language pop music. Examples include "Yo Meth, Yo Meth, where my killer tape at" from a Wu-Tang Clan song rendered as "Daughter-in-Law! Hey hey, Daughter in law! You've got Fumakilla [a Japanese brand of insecticide] stuck to you!", "I want to hold your hand" becoming "Idiotic public urination," and the Scorpions "You give me all I need" turning into "Watching snow and masturbating." Not all soramimi need be unintentional, the French author Luis d'Antin van Rooten published a book entitled Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames: The D'Antin Manuscript, which while ostensibly an anthology of rediscovered medieval poetry, actually consisted entirely of nonsense poems in French that were homophonic with English nursery rhymes. For example:
Lit-elle messe, moffette,
Satan ne te fête,
Et digne somme coeurs et nouez.
À longue qu’aime est-ce pailles d’Eure.
Et ne Satan bise ailleurs
Et ne fredonne messe. Moffette, ah, ouais!
The Eggcorn is another word (or phrase)substitution occurring as a result of homophony, this time (more often than not) as a result in dialectical shifts in a common tongue. The name itself comes from the example that named the phenomena, renaming acorns as "egg corns." In general, the eggcorn must not be an incredibly implausible substitution, else it would slip into the realm of malaprop1. Notable examples that many people use in day to day life are "social leopards" who tell "bold faced lies" in the "throngs of passion" who are "for all intensive purposes" "on tenderhooks" and "butt naked."
Finally the catachresis is simply a misuse of a word, often in the midst of mixed metaphors. Oration in Baroque tongue has often led to many unintentional catachreses. My personal favorite example of this phenomenon is this catachrestically dense excerpt from Joseph Heller's Catch-22: "Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning."
I certainly hope you have enjoyed this excursion into the world of linguistic ephemera. Feel free to write down any examples of the above listed that you have encountered in your day to day life, keep the folded paper near to you in say a locket or a small, velvet lined box, and re-read while chuckling softly to your self on some rainy day.
1The malaprop is, naturally, an inappropriate substitution of a homophone which lends humorous meaning to the phrase as a whole. There is a vast library of examples stretching all of the way back to the plays of Shakespeare. As for more modern examples, Chico Marx based much of his career on malaprops and the novelist Gene Wolfe featured a character in his novel Free Live Free who spoke almost entirely in malaprops.
