From little eggcorns . . .

The article described the phenomenon of "eggcorns" - words or phrases that people erroneously use when they mishear something.

Eggcorns got their name from the case of an American woman who wrote "egg corns" when she meant "acorns". This may seem a strange mistake, but it could be explained by the woman's awareness that an acorn is shaped like an egg and - like an egg - it is a sort of seed (or corn) from which something grows.

This oblique logic is at the heart of eggcorns, which differ from simple howlers or malapropisms in that they embody some sort of reasoning, however warped. So it would be an eggcorn to use the word shoot in place of chute (as in "he slid down the shoot"), since a chute is something you shoot down. The phrase "with bated breath" is sometimes misspelt as "with baited breath" - an error which seems understandable when you hear this poem by Geoffrey Taylor: Cruel Clever Cat Sally, having swallowed cheese, Directs down holes the scented breeze, Enticing thus, with baited breath, Nice mice to an untimely death.

Eggcorns arise by a process similar to folk etymology, whereby people misinterpret the origins of words and phrases because the words sound like other words. This leads to asparagus being misguidedly regarded as a perversion of "sparrow grass" (resulting in Cockneys using that phrase for the vegetable).

The Elephant and Castle area of London supposedly gets its name from a corruption of Infanta of Castile' but it actually derives from the name of a local pub with a sign depicting an elephant carrying a howdah (a castle').

Eggcorns are very similar to mondegreens, about which I wrote in this column some while ago. The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the word mondegreen as a result of her mishearing the ballad "They have slain the Earl of Murray/And laid him on the Green" as "They have slain the Earl of Murray/And Lady Mondegreen."

Some people restrict mondegreens to errors that result from misheard songs or poems. Malapropisms, on the other hand, are linguistic errors that result from replacing one word with another which the speaker or writer misguidedly thinks is correct. These were named after Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan's play The Rivals, who said things like "My affluence over my niece is small."

Howlers are ludicrous mistakes caused by sheer stupidity, especially among schoolchildren, who are notorious for writing such things as "Their victories were unpresidented before or since."

Howlers need not only reveal an ignorance of language: they can betray ignorance about anything, as in "America was discovered by Columbo" and "Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offence."

All these types of error can get confused with one another, as the Guardian correspondence made clear. The eggcorn purists would be happy to accept mistakes like "a mute point" for a moot point, "preying mantis" for praying mantis, or "diffuse" for defuse, because these make some sort of sense in the right context. But many of the examples quoted in the Guardian are on the boundary between eggcorns and simple howlers, like the examples of young children failing to catch words clearly, resulting in prayers to "Father, Son and Holy Goat"; "Our Father, which art in heaven, Harold be thy name"; and (among Nottingham youngsters) "Lead us not into Trent Station."

Many of the errors quoted by Guardian readers were misheard lyrics from songs, so perhaps these are mondegreens, not eggcorns. They included Creedence Clearwater Revival's refrain "There's a bad moon on the rise" being misheard as "There's a bathroom on the right"; Roy Orbison's "Only the lonely" transmogrified into "Only baloney"; and Joni Mitchell's "We are stardust; we are golden" turned into "We are starkers; we are going home".

Mishearings often occur because English is rich in homonyms - words that sound alike. This leads to the travel firm "Grade A Holidays" being downgraded to "Grey Day Holidays". This phenomenon also explains the way that sayings can change when passed verbally from one person to another, as in the game known as Russian Gossip or Chinese Whispers.

The most famous example of such a change is the message passed along a line of soldiers: "Send reinforcements, we're going to advance", which ended up as "Send three-and-fourpence, we're going to a dance".

So what are the commonest eggcorns? They include: one foul swoop; a damp squid; towing the line; giving something free reign; and passing an exam with flying collars. I particularly like the more outlandish ones, like "to give up the goat" (for ghost); "get your dandruff up" (for dander); "to grow like top seed" (for Topsy); pus jewel (for pustule); "old timers' disease" (for Alzheimer's disease); and whoa is me (for woe is me).

Well, I hope this article has peaked your interest and you have found it floorless and fullproof - for all intensive purposes without any alimentary mistakes. Perhaps my fame will spread like wildflowers, and I'll win a pullet surprise.

Tony Augarde is the author of The Oxford Guide to Word Games (OUP, £14.99) and The Oxford A to Z of Word Games (OUP, £4.99)