08.07.08

Rigged words

Posted in assorted weird crap, wordplay at 7:58 am by Bill Brohaugh

Over at the Fritinancy blog, Nancy Friedman lures me with two fascinating subjects. One is Diana Rigg, who portrayed Mrs. Emma Peel on the original Avengers. The other is . . . um, what was I talking about?

I was talking about . . . it will come to me . .  Peel, a homonym of peal, which rhymes with heal, a homonym of heel, which is a subject of fashion blogs, which . . . Oh yeah! Nancy’s primary subject (well, to her anyway) was mistaken words and phrases, with examples from fashion blogs. Such blogs, Nancy writes, “sometimes allow their enthusiasm for the subject to override their inner spellcheckers. (I’d assumed that most people learned the difference between heel and heal in, say, fourth grade, but such is apparently not the case.)” But homonym failure is a side topic in this particular Fritinancy post. The real topic is Diana Rigg.

Or . . . something else. The topic was . . . I remember now: eggcorns. The subject was “eggcorns,” also known as “mondegreens”: words and phrases created by mishearing the source words and phrases. (My earliest personal eggcorn affliction was thinking John Fogerty and Creedence sang not “There’s a bad moon on the rise” but “Hail the bathroom on the right”). While listing various eggcorns Nancy has seen in fashion blogs, she writes:

“With avengence.” Oh, I love this one. I spotted it in a comment to a funny/alarming Daily Mail (UK) article on age-inappropriate fashion: Carol wrote that her husband “hates [her gypsy skirts] with avengence [sic].” Here we have “a vengeance” compressed into a package that folds in the concept of to avenge (to take vengeance on behalf of). Carol may also be under the lingering influence of The Avengers. Can you believe that Diana Rigg just turned 70? I’ll bet she looks fab in gypsy skirts.

Umm, what was the subject? (Concentrate, Brohaugh, concentrate.) Eggcorns! Another eggcorn Nancy identifies is the frequent misunderstanding of midriff as midrift. I don’t understand why this is surprising, as my own mid has been drifting for some time now.

I just hope Diana doesn’t notice.

And while we’re at it, here are some Avenger moments of thesauretical banter, cliche reversal, verbal fencing, undercover wordplay, cleverly unintelligible military jargon—and John Steed’s misdirected taste in women:

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