"chocked full" (for the eggcorn files)

[Barnhart]

I always have said _chuck-full_ (which is OED 1770), much newer (more
appropriate for a kid like me).

Regards,
David
barnhart at highlands.com

American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on Friday, February 11,
2005 at 11:50 AM  wrote:


>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>Subject:      "chocked full" (for the eggcorn files)
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>In a letter of recommendation, a well-known linguist whose anonymity
>will be shielded here writes that a certain student maintains a web
>site "chocked full" of linguistic curiosities.  Checking on google, I
>find 39,400 hits for "chocked full", but it seems clear from the
>sources I checked (or chocked) that this can only be a reanalysis of
>"chock-full", which has been around since the 18th and possibly even
>the 15th c.  The OED reviews at its entry the long and inconclusive
>debate about the origin of "chock-full" and its variant "choke-full",
>and notes that
>
>Prob. there is a recent association with CHOCK n. and v., in some of
>their senses, but the latter are too late to be the origin; it is
>more likely that these senses have been developed under the influence
>of chock-full
>
>Both the semantics of the adjective (cf. "crammed", "stuffed",
>"packed") and the phonetic complexity of a putative -[kdf]- sequence
>support the plausibility of a participial origin of "chock-full", but
>given that no such origin exists, the  "chocked(-)full" spelling can
>be seen as involving another hypercorrective "re"storation.
>
>Larry
>