eggcorn

Thu May 19 22:27:24 UTC 2005

Wilson, language is truly a strange creature.  Who would have thought that a 21st Century white boy such as myself would prove fluent in both 17th C. WE and 20th C.BVE *simultaneously.*

Your intuition, however, remains sound. "[Abstract NP] is kicking NP's ass" *is* rare in WE, so far as my experience goes.

"So like Jack the Bear, you ain't no square,
But I passed the test - I jived the best!" -- Unknown

JL

Wilson Gray <wilson.gray at RCN.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: eggcorn
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On May 19, 2005, at 2:58 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

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> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Jonathan Lighter
> Subject: Re: eggcorn
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>
> My guess is that the absolutely dumbest solecisms, malapropisms,
> eggcorns, mondegreens, stupidisms, etc., almost never gain much
> currency, because most speakers recognize just how wrong they are.
> What's more, those that do manage to linger on in the spoken language
> rarely supplant a more sensble form in the written language (providing
> it really is more sensible) since professional writers are even more
> sensitive to howlers than are most people.
>
> By the time a once-insufferable gaffe of an idiom begins appearing
> regularly in written standard English, it's been around so long that
> it's objectionable feature is no longer obvious to most people.
> "Ain't" was only theoretically "ignorant," but never obviously
> "illogical." "O.K." required decades of widespread use to go from
> slang to the level of colloquialism. The grotesque orthographical
> humor in its etymology probably had to be forgotten before that could
> have happened. The etymologically ridiculous "irregardless" has been
> around for a while and shows no sign of disappearing, so I
> "prophesize" that if it lasts a whole lot longer, only grievous
> eggheads will have the wherewithal to object.
>
> I recently suggested that "sextuplets" meaning "any set of six
> children making up the entire offspring of a parent" might be a Sign
> Of The Apocalypse. But although the usage is ill-informed, it's not
> illogical. "A lady just had sextuplets on reality TV" would still
> mean the same as it does to us conservatives. If the solecistic usage
> really gains currency - along with, presumably, similarly misused
> "triplets," "quadruplets, etc.," I don't think English will be much
> harmed by it. Meanwhile, other currents continually enrich the
> language.
>
> Thus, French from really bad Latin. If Swift and Defoe could read the
> best English-language prose of today, they'd have a hissy fit over its
> barbarism. Meanwhile, to many of us, their diction has become stodgy
> and enervated.
>
> "_Mutabilitas_ doth kick our arse : / Thus diction pure can scarce
> endure." -- Unknown.
>
> JL
>

How old is that quote, Jon? One of the things about BE that's kind of
weird is that, sometimes, BE preserves phraseology that has died out
out in WE. But, other times, the phraseology is original to BE. Back in
the late '60's or the early '70's or so, a white DJ began to refer to
his show as "kick-ass radio." I'd never before heard a white person use
this, whereas I can't remember when it hasn't been used in BE. My
intuition is that "kick-ass" was derived ultimately from such as
"[Abstract NP] is kicking NP's ass!" phraseology that, to the best of
my knowledge, is still rather rare in WE. But your quote seems to
indicate that "[Abstract NP] doth kick NP's arse/ass" was, at one time,
ordinary and usual WE phraseology. So, we have preservation in BE and
not innovation, in this case. Beautiful! Well, historically beautiful.
Sociologically, of course, it blows. It's as much a downer as
discovering that Cleopatra was of Greek ancestry and not of sub-Saharan
ancestry. ;-) Of course, I am way too sophisticated ever to have
believed this. But a lot of African-American Studies types still go for
the okey-doke.

-Wilson

> "Rex W. Stocklin" wrote:
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> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: "Rex W. Stocklin"
> Subject: Re: eggcorn
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> At 11:16 PM -0700 5/16/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
>> Rex, Pres. Eisenhower always said "nucular," and he was always
>> ridiculed for it. But historians think he made a decent Prez. God
>> knows what Lincoln and Jackson sounded like.
>
> A president's record and accomplishments thankfully are not a
> function of their phonetics (unless it gets in the way of
> particularly tricky diplomacy, say, insulting an Emir by maligning
> his daughter's name) but what if a chief exec were incompetent both
> of tongue and of brain. Imagine a world like that. It would suck.
>
>> One reason we highly-trained professionals stress that eggcorns and
>> other, er, innovations "just are" is that there isn't a God-damned
>> thing we can do about them. If you doubt me, get people to quit
>> using "ain't."
>
> Wouldn't that be "there ain't a God-damned thing we can do about
> them"? ;-) As I understand it, most grammarians widely accept "Ain't"
> now, as they do prepositional sentence caps. As well as split
> infinitives. But I have yet to read or hear any groundswell take on
> acceptance of just any malaprop being accepted because of widespread
> misuse. Surely there must be some sort of litmus. But I guess
> language IS an art and not a science, so.... As one who falls fairly
> midway betwixt the prescriptivist and the descriptivist mindsets, I
> am able to cope with a great deal of evolution of the mother tongue,
> but not all.
>
> Honk if you love road rage,
> Lexy
> Fishers, IN
>
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