spade cat (was Re: "like" and "as if")

[Jonathan Lighter]

FWIW, when I first heard the word "spayed" as a child, the only sense I could make out of it was that they used a tiny spade (a sharp instrument) to do it.

Presumably, others have been similarly misled.

JL


"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: spade cat (was Re: "like" and "as if")
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On Jun 24, 2005, at 9:08 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> ... Which brings me to one of my favorite orthographic eggcorns,
> preserved from October 1995 when we were in the kitty-cat market.
> This classified ad appeared in our local throw-away weekly:
>
> SR. CITIZEN KITTY needs loving home, spade, all shots, healthy.
> I've been a good kitty & promise to be a purr-fect pet. Please
> call ____. Love Kitty.
>
> There are 130 google hits for "spade cat", and while some have the
> hipster meaning in mind-- ... --many clearly involve the eggcornish
> reading...

taken at face value this looks like an "anti-eggcorn" -- a respelling
that indicates a *failure* of analysis, that is, that treats the word
as unanalyzable. so i've been taking these occurrences of "spade" as
just ordinary misspellings, perhaps encouraged by some people's
failure to perceive "spayed" as "spay" + "ed". (for what it's worth,
"spayed" gets more google webhits than plain "spay", but not by much:
709,000 to 660,000. so it's not like "spay" is rare enough to be
disregarded.)

does anyone think of "spade" 'spayed' as involving one of the lexical
items "spade" (digging implement, card suit, black guy, whatever)?
that would make it a kind of eggcorn, though a non-canonical one.
otherwise, it's questionable.

it's not (yet) in the database, nor has it been brought up in the 400
+ comments there.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

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