Her dad was a cane-cutter,she once told me,from Far North Queensland,accounting for her bones battling with Melbourne’s chill. Even in her younger days,before the “rumourism” took hold,she struggled. Six years on,I’m still unsure whether Jo realised she’d invented a medical condition,and now it’s too late to ask.
Coined by British linguist Geoff Pullum,eggcorns owe their name to the childish distortion of “acorns”.iStock
Mind you,on a scale of one to 10,the ache of swollen joints would equate to the hurt of sensing others whispering behind your back. Both conditions would weigh you down,slow your step. Ancient Greek gave us rheuma,the root of rheumatism,a word for flow,our source of stream,plus the Rhine itself. Even rhyme relates,the singsong current of verse,just as rumours swash a village – though here the origin is Old Norse,where rymja meant to roar,as Jo would on her bad days.
Late in the piece,however,her gait turned buoyant. Rejuvenated. Poor old Abbie barely had time to piss. “You look so well,” I said,and she beckoned me closer,as if with a secret to share. “Yesterday,” she told me,“I had a courtesan injection.”
The difference was life-changing,clearly. Upping her entire mood and tempo. For a beat,I saw that Innisfail tomboy,and never found the heart to tell her the word was “cortisone”. Besides,maybe it was the courtesan stuff,a serum drawn from a viscount’s mistress,an amorous vaccine to whet the senses. She left me wondering at the gate.
Even now,her house empty,I’m scratching my head. The quandary is language and how the brain works. At the time,charmed by Jo’s gift for rubberising English,I’d treated her lapses as malapropisms,pure and simple. Pear-skins,say,was my toddler rendition of penguins,an innocent malapropism.
This last word honours a pompous guardian in Richard Sheridan’s 1775 play,The Rivals. Indeed,Mrs Malaprop – herself a twist on the French for wrongly – conflated allegories with alligators,epithets with epitaphs. In 2015,when a gifted pitcher called Pat Venditte joined the Oakland A’s,one paper gushed:“Amphibious Pitcher Makes Debut”. To be clear,Venditte could throw left or right – not underwater. Classic malapropism,no two ways about it.
But then Jo entered my life,as did the more recent concept of eggcorns,being malapropisms that somehow make sense. Wonderlust,say,is a reason we roam,as is wanderlust,the original condition. Just as nerve-wrecking jangles as sharply as nerve-racking – the mutated version born of the prototype.
Coined by Geoff Pullum,a British linguist,eggcorns owe their name to the childish distortion of “acorn”,the oak seed both ovoid as it is corn-coloured,giving the error a defendable logic. Recalling Jo and her so-called rumourism – which now feels a deliberate massage of the medical term,her droll makeover aimed at weakening the pain’s grip.
Equally,Jo’s courtesan jab,might well have been her winsome eggcorning of cortisone,deliberate or not,clearly her twilit stroll a more vibrant affair. Who’s to say? English is too messy to fit into neat boxes,a neighbour’s brain no less open to fathoming,let alone our own. One thing was sure:for a heartbeat at least,Jo and Abbie had a new leash on life,and now their house is empty.
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