galiant effort

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 21, 2005, at 9:34 PM, Matthew Gordon wrote:

> I heard "he made a galiant effort" today in a sports context.
> Google shows plenty of hits.
>
> This is not an egg[c]orn but I'm not sure what you call it. It
> seems like it might be contamination, which is what I've seen as
> the term for changes like that that led femelle > female in
> English. So gallant > galiant by contamination with the
> semantically similar valiant or valiant > galiant by contamination
> with vallant.

similar to "doctorial" for "doctoral" and "overature" for
"overture" (and the famous "nucular") -- morphological reshapings
facilitated by the form of semantically similar words.  i reported on
these on the Language Log a while back:

   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002158.html

it would be nice to have a name for them: nucular reanalyses?

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)