"chocked full" (for the eggcorn files)

[Wilson Gray]

On Feb 11, 2005, at 4:00 PM, Laurence Horn 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:      Re: "chocked full" (for the eggcorn files)
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> At 12:21 PM -0800 2/11/05, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>> On Feb 11, 2005, at 8:50 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>
>>> 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...
>>
>> Language Log posting by Mark Liberman on some variants of "chock
>> full",
>> 8/18/04:
>>   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001359.html
>>
>> response by me, with "chocked full", 8/19/04:
>>   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001363.html
>>
>> (with reference back to an ADS posting of mine on 4/29/04)
>
> Aha.  Should have known.  Well, now I can wonder about why the number
> of google hits has more than doubled from 18.7K to 39.4K from your
> search to mine.  Either the eggcorn hadn't completely hatched, or all
> those new 21K instances just needed those 9 months of gestation.
>
> larry
>

The answer is quite simple, Larry: using "chocked-full" is preferred to
"chock-full" because using "chock-full" would be too much like right.

I hope that my meaning is clear. Back at the '75 LSA in Frisco, a group
of three colleagues, at least one of whom is a member of this list,
approached me with a question. They asked, in effect, "Why don't you
talk black(er)?" Well, the obvious answer is that most fades have a
hard time understanding the language of shades. Having to draw a
semantic map of every turn of phrase is a stone bring-down.

-Wilson