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HE death of Richard Adams, author of Watership Down (see more on page 51) has turned my mind to anthropomorphism.

Turning one’s tongue to anthropomorphism is not as easy as turning one’s mind to it. It is a slow and slippery word, like a sloth after a leisurely bout of oil-wrestling. Anthropomorphism resists being grasped by the teeth and spat rapidly out through the lips. Try saying it fast: the tongue hits a pothole somewhere between “po” and “morph”. The only way to approach this word is slowly, or the wheels come off and the sloth wriggles free.

Perhaps we should talk about mixed metaphors rather than anthropomorphism, but I don’t think Piglet ate those. Piglet, one of the anthropomorphised animals who lived in AA Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood, ate haycorns. Like his friend Winnie the Pooh’s terrifying mythical heffalumps, Piglet’s haycorns were actually eggcorns.

Unlike its cousin the mondegreen, an eggcorn is not a misheard song lyric. (I have previously written about these and many of you still send fine examples, thank you — the latest was Jonathan Ancer’s interpretation of Olivia NewtonJohn’s torch song from Grease: “I’ve got shoes, they’re made of plywood”.)

An eggcorn is similar to a mondegreen in that it is often funny, but it does not come from a song. It is a usually common word or phrase misinterpreted in such a way that the resulting error makes as much or sometimes even more sense than the original, correct version.

One example is “tow the line” which is wrong but is so widely used instead of the correct “toe the line” that it is accepted by some dictionaries. Dictionaries track the changing whims of language use and they must tow the popular line.

“Toe the line” has several possible origins, involving athletes, sailors and members of parliament, all of whom at some point had to place their toes against some sort of mark to show their readiness for some kind of undertaking.

The erroneous “tow the line”, with its connotations of hanging onto a rope attached to a boat or a popular cause, is an easier concept to grasp in modern times than that of deckhands with their tootsies pushed against a plank as they waited to be whipped.

Many other eggcorns also sound eminently feasible. One that I hear all the time is “for all intensive purposes” (as opposed to “intents and purposes”). Intensive purposes do sound more serious and pressing than plain old purposes, do they not?

Other common eggcorns are “a mute point”, “give up the goat” (and “escape goat”), “nip it in the butt”, “cut to the cheese”, “state of the ark” and “old timer’s disease”. There are so many eggcorns flying around it’s enough to make one curl up in the feeble position.

Just as a mondegreen is itself a mondegreen (a fragment from the misheard lyric “laid him on the green”), an eggcorn is also an eggcorn. Piglet may have called them haycorns but many children refer to the fruit of the oak tree as eggcorns.

According to a recent article by Marko Ticak on the language blog Grammarly.com, the term comes from a conversation between linguists Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum. The first mentioned the error “eggcorn”; the second wrote that we might as well give that name to this sort of mistake. That was in 2003, and it took just seven years for eggcorns to be admitted into the Oxford English Dictionary.

Children are particularly good at the unconscious eggcorn game. My cousin loved “cold slaw” and “Holland Day sauce” and I thought the fencing wire with sharp little barbs wrapped around it was made by a man called Bob (“Bob wire”). My friend Ana thought a singer who behaved outrageously was a “preMadonna”, and my colleague Andrew Unsworth thought “upsetting the apricot” was what happened when you were naughty.

It just goes to show, “irregardless” of how fast you can say anthropomorphism, life and language would be much less interesting if we got it right all the time. LS