Play it By Ear or Year?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Jack. I’m calling from Spokane.

Hello, Jack.

My girlfriend and I will get into a little fight, more of a conversation, I guess, about the phrase, play it by ear.

So we’ll be going through our day and we’ll be trying to make a plan. She’ll say, let’s play it by ear.

And I said, so, okay, I guess I’ll find out a year from now, right?

And so I’ll say, play it by ear. I just wanted to know the history behind this.

I mean, obviously, it’s clear the meaning of the phrase, but I don’t know the history of it. And I wanted to know if you guys had any insight to where that came from.

So you’re saying play it by ear, E-A-R, and she’s saying play it by ear, Y-E-A-R.

Correct.

Okay. And you’re arguing about which is correct?

Yes.

What’s your argument for ear?

Well, so I think the space between one ear and the other is pretty short. So it’s kind of like the distance between is relatively short and that we’re going to, oh, I don’t know. That’s the only phrase I can come up with. But it’s one step at a time, essentially. And I guess her argument is that ears are not a measurement of time, but years are. And so I guess that’s where we’re coming from.

So what each of you mean by the phrase you’re using is, let’s see how it goes. Let’s improvise. Let’s not follow any particular plan.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah. And that’s the meaning of the term. Let’s play it by ear is a musical term.

Think of a musician kind of sitting in, you know, they show up unexpectedly and they don’t have the sheet music, but they’re going to follow along and play it by ear.

Just kind of hear what the other musicians are doing and improvise and kind of fill in where they can based upon their skill and knowledge of music in general and the skill of the other performers.

That’s playing it by ear.

Oh, that makes so much sense.

And then responding, yeah.

So your version of it played by ear is the correct one.

But what’s really interesting, your girlfriend is performing what’s known as a linguistic phenomenon by the name of an egg corn, E-G-G-C-O-R-N, where people misunderstand for really logical reasons, often phonetic reasons, and they have a pretty plausible explanation for it.

And so it sounds right, both in meaning and auditorially.

And so her explanation that because year is a measure of time makes some sense.

And the other thing is the Y in by, play it by year, you could see how that could become attached to the word ear.

So maybe by year, right? So it kind of makes sense that there’s an allusion where that Y then becomes attached to the ear.

So there is a fantastic website that we’ve talked about on the show before called the Eggcorn Database.

Again, that’s E-G-G-C-O-R-N, where volunteers keep track of these in English.

And it’s so much fun. And they try not to make fun of people.

It’s really just kind of remarkable how many times we hear something and we’re so intelligent as creatures that we seek to explain this stuff with whatever knowledge we have at hand.

So, Jack, what Grant is saying is that you have a very intelligent girlfriend.

Oh, I do know.

What I’m saying is that this isn’t caused by stupidity. She’s performing the same thing that she’s done her whole life as a speaker of any language.

From the very first day that we’re born, we start trying to puzzle out the meaning of the sounds around us.

And she’s still doing that. We’re all doing that. And she’s still trying to puzzle it out.

And sometimes the explanations that we come up with go astray. But that’s pretty logical, what she came up with.

Her understanding of the sounds and the meaning were pretty logical, even if they weren’t correct.

And I must admit, I saw this video on the BBC’s YouTube channel that went on to say that kind of like malifors or like you said, those acorns are actually a very important part of the creation and evolution of our language.

And so we’ve gone from arguing to saying, well, this is just an evolution of our language. And I think it’s so cool.

So this is really exciting.

It’s super cool.

Yeah, that’s exactly right.

So we have gone from just saying, oh, those people are dumb, to understanding that this is a group phenomenon that explains how we learn, and there’s something in the brain and mouth.

So now we say, oh, this shows us how language works.

Right. This is a clue. This is an explanation of language, not an accident of language.

This is important to know.

So your girlfriend actually is part of that larger phenomenon of showing us how language really works.

And this isn’t like blowing smoke. This is really what linguists do.

We look at mistakes and say, aha, evidence, we can use this.

Right. And so to confirm or to, I guess, I mean, I’m sure I can look on this website, but I mean, another example that comes to mind is all intensive purposes.

Yeah, exactly. That’s a great one.

Yeah. Is that another like egg corn?

Yeah, absolutely. All intensive purposes instead of all intents and purposes.

Yes.

So let her know that you love her. Make her dinner. Take her out. Let her watch whatever she wants on TV for the rest of the month.

And then play it by ear. See what happens.

I love the show, guys. Thank you so much for taking my call.

Jack, thank you so much.

Thanks. Have a good one. Bye.

Hi to your girlfriend.

Well, what’s the conversation about language that’s been going on in your house? It’s time to call us 877-929-9673 or send us an email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.