spade cat (was Re: "like" and "as if")

[Laurence Horn]

>FWIW, when I first heard the word "spayed" as a child, the only
>sense I could make out of it was that they used a tiny spade (a
>sharp instrument) to do it.

Which is what makes it a (potential) first-order, rather than anti-,
eggcorn (for such speakers).

L

>Presumably, others have been similarly misled.
>
>JL
>
>
>"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
>Subject: Re: spade cat (was Re: "like" and "as if")
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>On Jun 24, 2005, at 9:08 AM, Larry Horn wrote:
>
>>  ... Which brings me to one of my favorite orthographic eggcorns,
>>  preserved from October 1995 when we were in the kitty-cat market.
>>  This classified ad appeared in our local throw-away weekly:
>>
>>  SR. CITIZEN KITTY needs loving home, spade, all shots, healthy.
>>  I've been a good kitty & promise to be a purr-fect pet. Please
>>  call ____. Love Kitty.
>>
>>  There are 130 google hits for "spade cat", and while some have the
>>  hipster meaning in mind-- ... --many clearly involve the eggcornish
>>  reading...
>
>taken at face value this looks like an "anti-eggcorn" -- a respelling
>that indicates a *failure* of analysis, that is, that treats the word
>as unanalyzable. so i've been taking these occurrences of "spade" as
>just ordinary misspellings, perhaps encouraged by some people's
>failure to perceive "spayed" as "spay" + "ed". (for what it's worth,
>"spayed" gets more google webhits than plain "spay", but not by much:
>709,000 to 660,000. so it's not like "spay" is rare enough to be
>disregarded.)
>
>does anyone think of "spade" 'spayed' as involving one of the lexical
>items "spade" (digging implement, card suit, black guy, whatever)?
>that would make it a kind of eggcorn, though a non-canonical one.
>otherwise, it's questionable.
>
>it's not (yet) in the database, nor has it been brought up in the 400
>+ comments there.
>
>arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
>
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