"reVEL" (eggcorn or phonological blend?)

[Wilson Gray]

As fate would have it, for me, "revel" is totally a literary term. I've
*never* heard it spoken by anyone - well, not that I've been aware of,
at least - though I've seen it in print countless times. Nevertheless,
I've always "pronounced" it and "heard" it as ['rEv at lz] in my mind.
It's clearly the only acceptable pronunciation. ;-)

-Wilson Gray

On May 13, 2005, at 10:54 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      "reVEL" (eggcorn or phonological blend?)
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>
> 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.
>