Fwd: Eggcorn perfection: "Carrot on a stick"/"Carrot and stick"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 11:48:00 -0800, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
>
>i checked the obvious (and easy-to-access) places: the ADS-L archives,
>the Language Log archives (now chock-full, chocked-full, chuck-full,
>jock-full, shock-full, etc. of eggcorns), Paul Brians's Common Errors
>in English site, MWDEU, Word Spy, World Wide Words, and Word Detective.
>  nothing in any of these except the last, in which evan morris reports
>much the same lack of resolution that jan freeman describes above.

Actually, Paul Brians does have a page on it in the "non-errors" section
of his site, though his discussion is similarly inconclusive:

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http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/carrot.html

"Carrot on a stick" vs. "the carrot or the stick."

The Usenet Newsgroup alt.usage.english has debated this expression several
times, most recently in spring 1998. No one there presented definitive
evidence, but dictionaries agree that the proper expression is "the carrot
or the stick".

One person on the Web mentions an old "Little Rascals" short in which an
animal was tempted to forward motion by a carrot dangling from a stick. I
think the image is much older than that, going back to old magazine
cartoons (certainly older than the animated cartoons referred to by
correspondents on alt.usage.english); but I'll bet that the cartoon idea
stemmed from loose association with the original phrase "the carrot or the
stick" rather than the other way around. An odd variant is the claim
broadcast on National Public Radio March 21, 1999 that one Zebediah Smith
originated this technique of motivating stubborn animals. This is almost
certainly an urban legend.

[etc.]
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>anybody have further data or insights?  (please, please, don't just
>argue that one of these sources seems more plausible to you than the
>other, or report your lifelong usage.  campaigning and voting will get
>us nowhere.)

I find nothing earlier than the dates given by Doug Wilson (1876 for the
carrot vs. stick metaphor, 1949 for "carrot on a stick"):

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http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/moa/moa-cgi?notisid=ABR0102-0131&byte=248400061
The Living age, Volume 131, Issue 1688, October 21, 1876, p. 140
They were to man what carrots or sticks are to a horse or an ass — engines
of manufacture, not revelations of truth. It was this carrot and stick
discipline to which Mr. John Mill was subjected, and which he accepted
dutifully as flowing from that perfect wisdom of which up to this time his
father had been the representative.
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Portland (Maine) Press Herald, December 9, 1949, p. 17
We cannot go on coaxing the jackass to the polls by suspending a carrot on
a stick before him.
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-- Ben Zimmer