"reVEL" (eggcorn or phonological blend?)

[Laurence Horn]

Today Bill Walton (former basketball great and current announcer and
analyst) was commenting that unlike some other immortal big men (Bill
Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Shaquille O'Neal, like Wilt
Chamberlain, has always enjoyed the limelight; he "revels" in his
celebrity.  Only the last verb was pronounced [ri'vElz] rather than
['REv at lz], the latter being the only pronunciation I can ever
remember hearing.  I'm sure Walton was somehow (either at the level
of parole or langue) merging the meaning of "revel" with the stress
pattern of "rebel" ([ri'VEL] or [r@'VEL]).  Interestingly, the two
verbs are cognates, but there's been a semantic and phonological
parting of the ways some time ago.

Larry

P.S.  I just thought of a way to check an orthographic correlate of
this reanalysis, on the assumption that the Big Redhead isn't alone
in this.  Sure enough, we find:

The album [The Muppet Show 2] revelles in the talents of six
outstanding performers

He revelles in dismantling temples, teasing Brahmins, and encouraging bribery.

Girl who loves to dream, lives her life to the extreme with
adrenaline (With adrenaline)/
Revelles in her delight, and she plays hard through the night

B is the Bastard that revelles in it.


But I grant that we can't *really* be sure that this spelling--which
for all I know is historically attested, although I can't find it in
the OED--entails a pronunciation with final stress; it may just be
created by analogy with the frequent (if "dispreferred") past tense
spelling _revelled_. (I note that my version of Eudora turns up its
red nose at "revelle" and "revelles" but accepts "revelled" with
equanimity.