one good eggcorn deserves another

[Alice Faber]

--On Saturday, December 11, 2004 1:50 PM -0800 "Arnold M. Zwicky"
<zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:

> On Dec 11, 2004, at 1:12 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>> Arnold's post on "carrot on a stick" vs. "carrot and (a) stick" adds
>> one more reanalysis (in whichever direction) of this kind to an
>> already bulging sheaf of them, many discussed on the list over the
>> years...
>
>> So "mano a mano" is often understood as "man on man" (or hence
>> something like "face to face") rather than "hand to hand".   But what
>> we also increasingly find is that "mano a mano" turns into "mano y
>> mano"...
>
> wonderful.  i reported on larry's "mano a mano" reanalyses in a
> Language Log posting a while back ("Still on the Eggcorn Beet":
> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001390.html), but
> this takes things one step further.  junk spanish, anyone?
>
> arnold

We don't have to call it "junk" anything...It's a marker of presumed
foreign origin, like the pronunciation [lanzhere] rather than the more
authentic [lanzheri] (for lingerie); after all, French words are more
likely to end in /e/.

--
Alice Faber
afaber at panix.com