Mark Peters on Eggcorns
- Posted by: Mark Peters , KimScafuro
- on March 18, 2008 at 1:54 am
If you saw Blades of Glory last year, you may have chuckled when Will Ferrell used the word “mind-bottling,” which he defined as “when your thoughts get so twisted up it’s like they’re trapped in a bottle.” Or maybe you have a friend who likes to email about “jar-dropping” events in “lame man’s terms.”
“Mind-bottling,” “jar-dropping,” and “lame man’s terms” are all eggcorns—a type of common and somewhat logical language goof named after a misspelling of “acorn.” Eggcorns have garnered quite a following on the web, where they were first discussed on the popular linguistics blog Language Log in 2003. If you can answer yes to any of the following questions, then you may have to check your own nest for eggcorns: When you really care about a cause, do you try to strum up support? Are you a perfectionist who hates to do things half-hazardly? Do complex moral issues fill you with a paralyzing cognitive dissidence? And finally, are you tired of paying exuberant prices?
Linguists—like Language Log’s Mark Liberman, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Arnold Zwicky—insist that eggcorns aren’t eggcorns unless they make at least a little bit of sense: “Strum up support” fits the bill because the meaning is so close to the correct “drum”—one musical metaphor is (almost) as logical as another. When we experience cognitive dissonance, it sometimes feels as if obstinate hemispheres of our brain are dissenting. “Half-hazard” is an apt, though unintentional, synonym for “haphazard,” and though exorbitant prices cause little exuberance in shoppers, high prices and high moods are probably linked in the minds of the eggcorners.
As a language columnist, writing teacher, and rabid word nut, I hunt for eggcorns in all seasons but have no immunity to laying my own: Though I rarely have occasion to party hearty in my tighty whities, I did used to write “party hardy” and “tidy whities.” (Sadly, I just had to revise that last sentence to put the eggcorns and the originals in the right spots, and I plan on quintuple-checking it before publication.)
The website Eggcorn Database has catalogued more than 500 of these errors, including “cease the opportunity” (seize the opportunity), “whoa is me” (woe is me), “girdle one’s loins” (gird one’s loins), “financial heartship” (financial hardship), “throngs of passion” (throes of passion), “mute point” (moot point), and “without further adieu” (without further ado). I think my favorite is “lack toast and tolerant,” a dietary problem that makes lactose intolerance seem like a pleasant alternative to a barren, toastless existence. Giggles aside, the point of eggcorn-collecting isn’t to make fun but to shed light: on the ways people—including you and I—make meaning out of stuff we know and stuff we’ve heard. As Pullum has written on Language Log, “it would be so easy to dismiss eggcorns as signs of illiteracy and stupidity, but they are nothing of the sort. They are imaginative attempts at relating something heard to material already known. One could say that people should look things up in dictionaries, but what should they look up? If you look up eggcorn, you’ll find it isn’t there. Now what?”
Eggcorns aren’t necessarily errors at all. Instead, they are a type of language evolution, and they are being closely monitored by the people who make our dictionaries; even if you can’t find your eggcorn there right now, you might soon. The seemingly impossible mission of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, is to record the entire history of the English language. The OED uses something called the Oxford English Corpus to get a handle on current usage. The Corpus—a constantly evolving collection of texts including novels, newspapers, blogs, and chat rooms—contains 2 billion English words (though almost 100 million of those words are “the”) and gives the OED the best possible look at how people are using language. It also shows how common some eggcorns are, beating out the original (“correct”) terms in countless incidents. The adoption of these eggcorns indicates that eventually they won’t be considered errors at all, and many are already accepted variants.
So next time you see an eggcorn, don’t curse the heavens. Refrain from removing your eyeballs with a spork. Please don’t start a blog about kids these days and how they’re spilling Red Bull all over our nice dictionaries. These mind-bottling, jar-dropping mistakes show people are smart—not stupid—and this process of the masses’ getting it wrong until it becomes right is common, ongoing, and unstoppable.
Eggcorns that became (or are becoming) accepted words:
scavenger’s daughter:
This torture device, which painfully compressed the body, was named “Skevington’s daughter” for the lieutenant at the Tower of London who invented it. It’s not known what mix of black humor and misunderstanding led to the name change, but “scavenger” had a nasty enough sound to catch on.
Jerusalem artichoke:
Previously known as the “girasole artichoke,” the name changed sometime in the 17th century after years of being misheard and misrepeated. It does not grow anywhere near Jerusalem.
piggyback:
This word has been spelled an astounding number of ways, but the first was “a pick pack,” as used in 1564. From there, it morphed into “pick-a-pack,” “pick-back,” “picky-back,” “pig-a-back,” and “pig back,” before settling down as the word we all know today.
cockroach:
Foreign words are particularly prone to eggcorning, so Captain John Smith needn’t feel bad about the fact that in 1624 he misspelled the Spanish “cucaracha” as “cacarootch,” leading to the current spelling.
proud flesh:
The Dictionary of American Regional English shows that this medical term for unsightly, excess tissue has been misunderstood as “plowed flesh,” “plowed flush,” “prod flesh,” “proud flush,”
and “proud fresh”—errors that are all somewhat logical and all totally gross.
soup up/supe up:
These phrases demonstrate well the seductive logic of eggcorns. Soup is for colds, not cars, right? But language isn’t so logical, and the original expression is indeed “souped up.”
minuscule/miniscule:
According to Zimmer and the Oxford English Corpus, uses of “miniscule” outnumber those of “minuscule,” but it’s close. “Minuscule” is related to “minus,” but the word people actually remember is “mini.” Words like “miniature” and “mini-me” have had a greater influence, leading to this miniscule spelling change.
rife/ripe with:
“Rife” is rarely used and means little to us these days, so “ripe” is catching on, even in The New York Times. The association with smell makes sense in many contexts: anything ripe with corruption or injustice certainly stinks.
coming down the pike/pipe:
Since at least 1901, people have been coming down the pike, but when the object became obsolete, people started coming down the pipe. It’s successful because many folks wouldn’t know a turnpike from a head-on-a-pike, but pipes are commonplace.
free reign/rein, reins/reigns of power:
Except for those lucky cops who get their own horses, most people know very little of reins—but they do know something about the reigns of residents, dictators, champions, and other royalish types.
DISCUSSION: 38 Comments
So, an eggcorn is like a malapropism that not only sounds plausable, but that a lot of people use?
I like this one that we hear/see a lot in the South: chester droors (chest of drawers.) My whole childhood I thought that particular piece of furniture was named after some guy named Chester.
An old work mate of mine used to say this when she meant, “you get what you pay for”…not exactly an eggcorn, but close enough.
As a post-secondary school sociology instructor, I frequently have the pleasure of coming across “eggcorns” in my students’ essay papers. I find it interesting how students try to make sense of what they read and hear, and it sure makes marking a whole lot more fun! My personal favorites are: “after all, we are just human beans” and “television has become an escape goat for many people”.
While I’m pretty sure the traditional phrase is to “flesh out” an idea or a paragraph or whatever, in my line of work the much-more-commonly used “flush out” does seem more … well, descriptive.
And then there’s the pronunciation-inspired eggcorn I see all the time: “verbage” (instead of “verbiage”).
Those wacky fifty-dollar words and the people who love them!
I know so many who like to use exacerbate in place of exaggerate, even in positive circumstances. As someone who truly believed things were completed in “one fowl swoop,” as a chicken might do, I find eggcorns endearing.
Reminds me of a Joey line from the TV show Friends. Allow me to paraphrase, “It’s a moo point. You know, it’s like a cow’s opinion: it doesn’t mean anything.”
-Dave
I grew up on farm with a rather dichotomous upbringing that included hauling hay bales and scooping stalls as well as lessons in curtsying, walking with books on my head to correct my exuberant gait, intellectual dinner discussions and a father who must have said at least a million times “Food is done! People are finished!”. God forbid I should ask if my sister was “done” with that book. Yeesh.
The Queen’s manners and the King’s English were expected at all times…except when you were using a post hole digger..actually, even then. So imagine my dismay when my fiance uttered this eggcorn…”pacifically” for “specifically”. All my years of military training in English usage kicked in before I could get control of myself. I was aghast, appalled! How could I marry this cretin?? My verbal dander was up, and the roseate aura surrounding me was falling away. Thinking that maybe this was an attempt at humor, I asked him, “Are you sure you don’t mean “atlantically”?…His puzzled expression only confirming that this was no joke. I imagined pained dinner conversation at Christmas where I would have to take a Xanax to keep myself from imploding with anxiety over his potential use of this eggcorn. My parents would immediately tell me to dump him. There would be tears and vociferous defenses of my loved one while I secretly wondered about him myself.
This is really only slightly over the top. My father corrected my perfect English for 42 years until one Christmas all four-plus decades of nit-picking just became one nit too many. I blew. I was angry, he was hurt. We eventually got over it. Poetic license became my new mantra. However, although I grew to convince myself that my fiance’s eggcorn was just a quirky little part of who he was and loved him for a long time, we are no longer affianced. Was it the fault of the eggcorn? Who can say?
I’ve always liked “for all intensive purposes.”
“Without further doodoo” is my personal favorite.
My favorite is “I would just assume” vs. “as soon”
I once watched a weather report where a woman’s home was destroyed in a tornado and she kept a brick as a “momentum” to remember it by. Instead of momento. It certainly made a bit of sense as it was heaved by a massive wind!
I was raised on “kaddy-cornered” but see it as written as “kitty-corner” in some books.
One that I hear quite frequently is “world-wind” instead of whirl-wind. As in it was a whirl-wind romance. I also have a family member who refers to her weiner dog puppy as a dash hound instead of a dachsund.
My brother says “escavator” instead of “excavator”, just to be funny. But then he realized that his wife didn’t realize he was joking, and she was using it in front of other people. Also he ran a paint business for years and wrote many checks to “Sherman Williams”. Oh and my sister used to get excited for “Santa Closet” to come.
I have many people look funny at me because I use the proper words and say them properly which is usualy 180° off from common usuage. I do not try to be this way my Father was a real stickler for speaking properly and pronounceing ones words with the proper inflection and so on. On top of that I had to go to speech Therapy as a child so between that and my Father correcting me constantly I am just different from the norm. I find that I am constatly correcting my three son’s and my wife all the time. I am not trying to be a jerk or a prat it is just something I do without thinking because it was hammered into me so much due to my speech problem. People often tell me that I speak like I was educated at Harvard or some other Ivy League school! Now it is just too bad I do not write like that! I am an oral learner and teacher my writeing skills are not that great!
I wanted to add that I would wager a guess that most accorns are committed by people lke me. By that I mean we have huge spoken vocabulary but are poor writer’s and poor speller’s. I learned to speak English phoeticly and that is how I spell which usually means I mis spell most of my words. If I do not spell check I have no clue and often I am so far off spell check has no clue what I am trying to spell !!!! That is probably where most of this coems from. To add to that my wife is dyslexic and so my boy’s inherited some of that from her. So their haveing simalar problems they can speak with much more authority then they can write. My wifes entire family males and females have that problem. I am the only person that can read her youngest brother’s letter’s because he writes phoneticly and has really bad dyslexia. I can read it just as smoothly as I can read printed text because I write much the same way when I write by hand. Few other though can make out what is saying. So “eggcorns” are probably showing up more and more because more people like me and her brother are spending more and more time writeing messeges to people in a formatt that we are not very good at useing that being writeing!
Cross analyze this with the issues of people singing their own versions of song lyrics – how much of all this is really mispronounciation that makes us think it ’sounds like’ something else, or we can’t quite make out the words, so our brains ‘insert word choice here’ type of thing?Either way, it’s damn funny to listen to – my DH does it all the time, but with words whose meanings exclude them from being eggcorns. = )
” Jose can you see…..”
how about this one: raising the flag at half-mast. While some boats do have a flag on their mast, I do think most flags are raised on a staff, but many times I have heard the other…
My mother used to teach kindergarten in an extremely disadvantaged neighborhood. One day she received an absence note for one of her students. The mom had written, “Please excuse Mary from school, she has diet-rear.” Some other gems were “bag-up” (a retrograde movement) and the ubiquitous piece of bedroom furniture known to some as the ‘chester,’ and to others as a chest of drawers!
As an English teacher, I get these all of the time, as well…one favorite is “no holes barred”-meaning, there’s nothing standing in your way to get out of a tight situation, i suppose.
My husband and I listened to a speaker in church who was lamenting that his daughter had, “contracted a congenital disease.” We managed not to laugh out loud until we made it to the car…
When I was teaching English Comp at a community college years ago, one of my students wrote, “It’s a doggie-dog world.” And, “Everything comes down to surval of the fetus.” I’ve always thought the first was true. The second is probably illegal after the second trimester.
One of the most misleading eggcorns I have encountered is saying “Dutch” when you really mean “German”, i.e. “Deutsch”. The most common use is “Pennsylvania Dutch”, which refers to German immigrants. I’ve also seen it in “Dutch angle”, which is a movie making term referring to tilting the camera sideways to give a sense of tension in a scene (e.g. as was used in the old 1960s “Batman” television show whenever a scene was shot in the villians lair). The term comes from its use in early 20th century German films.I would bet that there are many other exemplars of this haycorn.
My favorite is Valentime’s Day instead of Valentine’s. I thought it was only my students who had the problem, but I heard someone say it on tv the other day!