Word of the day: Mondegreen

[lsanderson]

I’m too embarrassed to ask the lexicographers if they have a favorite word. They get that a lot. Peter Gilliver tells me his anyway: twiffler. A twiffler, in case you didn’t know, is a plate intermediate in size between a dinner plate and a bread plate. “I love it because it fills a gap,” Gilliver says. “I also love it because of its etymology. It comes from Dutch, like a lot of ceramics vocabulary. Twijfelaar means something intermediate in size, and it comes from twijfelen, which means to be unsure. It’s a plate that can’t make up its mind!”

Fiona McPherson gives me mondegreen. A mondegreen is a misheard lyric, as in, “Lead on, O kinky turtle.” It is named after Lady Mondegreen. There was no Lady Mondegreen. The lines of a ballad, “They hae slain the Earl of Murray,/And laid him on the green” are misheard as “They have slain the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen.”

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Comments

[alisgray.livejournal.com]

excellent. now we need a word that means "unable to distinguish left from right" but does not imply "has difficulty with words or reading."

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Heh. Good point. Let's call them the braineaters!

As a note -
I am unable to distinguish north from south, can distinguish right from left, I read "better" than other people (i.e. I do not read left to right, but absorb whole lines, phrases, paragraphs), but have trouble when I need to read something slowly left-to-right, and my spelling is awful! Whee, brains are fun.

Compass

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

I think some of us have a compass sense (I think I do, but it does get confused.) -- an internal sense of "North." And then again, some of us have to try to write to remember which had is the right hand...

[neugotik.livejournal.com]

James Gleick, is awesome! Thanks for the post: I also love his book "Chaos" ; & lexicon info is always fun!

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

We call a twiffler a luncheon plate.

K.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

You know, that's a fantastically irritating article. It discusses the internet and its relation to the OED at great length, and it never links to the OED web site, but even more damning, the link that it does give is broken. Yeesh. If the NYT gets this stuff wrong, what hope is there for daily newspapers?

K.

I think...

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

The OED is a heavy pay site, although there should be a front end..

Probably available at http://www.askoxford.com

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I think it's about ten years ago that the NYTimes ran an article about how New York City's dialect was dying out. Every expert quoted said, quite plainly, that it was CHANGING, not dying.

That's when I gave up on the NYTimes being accurate.

I've found USA Today much more accurate.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I recommend the Eggcorn Database: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/ (eggcorns being the things oaks grow from.)