More on "calvary"

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:11 AM -0700 4/24/07, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Apr 24, 2007, at 8:38 AM, Rosemarie wrote:
>
>>...Besides the misspelling, I believe this is a malaproprism, since
>>the
>>military fighting unit is a "cavalry" and not a "calvary."
>
>it's in most of the standard sources -- Brians, MWDEU, Garner, etc.
>-- as a common error.
>
>>... None of the 10 entries, in fact, gives any military  connection
>>whatsoever.
>>The only connection I can think of between a  cavalry and a
>>calvary, is that
>>having a cavalry charge at you might induce  extreme suffering,
>>mental and
>>otherwise!
>
>surely not a semantic confusion, but a spelling error:  the two words
>have the same seven letters in different orders.  in fact, they both
>begin with CA and end with RY, and the troublesome part comes in the
>middle (which is generally the least salient part of a word, unless
>the middle part is accented, which it's not in this case).
>
>what makes the error like a (classical) malapropism is that it's a
>confound of two existing words.
>
>but there seems to be some contribution of phonological difficulty;
>the L-R (the hyphen indcates a syllable division) is a bit
>troublesome, so that there's some temptation to move the L out of the
>way, giving CALVARY (with a more favored syllable structure -- *and*
>it's an existing word) or CAVLARY (600 or so hits; V-L isn't as good
>as L-V, but it's not so bad) or, moving the L back instead of
>forward, CAVARLY (some hits, hard to estimate how many because this
>occurs as a proper name; R-L is better than L-R, and the result ends
>in the very common final syllable LY).
>
>you can see the phonological effect independent of the existing-word
>effect by looking at misspellings of CHIVALRY.  quite a few (9k or
>so) for CHILVARY, with L-V; 800 or so for CHIVLARY, with V-L; and 600
>or so for CHIVARLY, with R-L.  none of these alternative spellings is
>an existing word.
>
>the spelling of unaccented vowels is an independent variable.  there
>are a modest number of misspellings of CALVARY as CALVERY and of
>CHIVALRY as CHIVELRY.
>
Note along the same lines "irrevelant" for "irrelevant".  77,700 hits
for the former, many of them not prescriptive tracts bemoaning the
malapropism.  Of course here there's no "irrevelant" to confuse it
with, but the influence of "irreverent" may be not entirely
irrelevant.  Along the l/r lines, there's also "heffalump" for
"elephant", mutatis mutandis.

LH

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