Yes, and ....

Really, improv is fun -- if scary -- to do.

Wrote about my experiences with it and Houston's improv scene recently for The Buzz Magazines.

Eggcorns

I always thought those funny turns of phrase people unwittingly say were malapropisms. But malapropisms are when someone, instead of using the word they meant, use another that sounds similar. Sometimes it can be funny but only because it doesn’t make sense. It’s like their spoken auto-correct went wrong.

What I’m thinking of are eggcorns. That’s when somebody uses a word or adjusts the word they use, not just because it sounds similar, but because it does make sense. The name “eggcorn” comes from a woman who thought that the word “acorn” was “eggcorn.” It made sense to her.

As Jan Freeman, who blogs about language, wrote six years ago when “eggcorn” was officially recognized as a word by the Oxford English Dictionary, “Because they make sense, eggcorns are interesting in a way that mere disfluencies and malapropisms are not: They show our minds at work on the language, reshaping an opaque phrase into something more plausible. They’re tiny linguistic treasures, pearls of imagination created by clothing an unfamiliar usage in a more recognizable costume.” She points out that eggcorns often go on to become an accepted part of our language. In other words, they help language evolve.

When Merriam Webster added eggcorn to its dictionary more recently, NPR and Time  published more examples and pointed out another nifty word: mondegreen, which is when people mishear song lyrics in ways that make goofy sense.

My favorite eggcorn was when my young daughter, referring to the kind of doctor women go to, called them “vaginacologists.”

She also came home from school one day excited to tell me all about the “Heimlich remover.”

My father, years ago, was talking about someone who had gone into a mental-health facility called Star Haven. He heard it as “Stark Raving.”

I love these.

The Voice in My Head

I sometimes record the interviews I do.

It’s never really worked well. Recording and transcribing interviews is, for many reasons, a huge pain in the ass.

But the biggest is that I just hate having to listen to myself.

Everyone says the reason why we don’t like to hear ourselves is that we are not used to how our voices really sound. We are used to hearing ourselves from inside our own heads.

Nah, what makes me squirm as I transcribe are all my pauses, my ummms and aahhs and irritating verbal ticks. I, for example, suck my breath in audibly every time I am about to speak. Every time. Some theorize that pauses and tics serve a purpose, making us sound natural, letting us finesse spoken conversation. I don’t know: Listening to these recordings, I wonder how anyone can stand to be in the same room with me.

And in these interviews, I talk way too much. But that’s not just me. Have you ever noticed people asking questions – whether professional journalists at a news conference or that bozo at the lecture you’re attending – often go on and on, trying to prove how smart they are and how much they know? Meanwhile, the rest of us are like, “Get to the damn question, jerk wad.” But asking a good, succinct question and getting out of the way (till it’s time to follow up) is hard to do.

Still, the one-minute rule, where you try to keep your utterances to a minute or less, is a good rule of thumb, especially in an interview, where, after all, the whole idea is to hear what the other person has to say.

And my minute is now up.