"Alterior motive" redux

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 6/6/06, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> Today, I came across "alterior motive" for the first time. However, a
> quick look at the Eggcorn Forum revealed that it was nothing new.
> Unfortunately, a poster attempted to make real sense out of this
> eggcorn, pointing out that _alter_ is Latin for "other." And so it is,
> but in a very restricted sense: "alter" means specifically "the other
> of _two_" and was regularly used as the ordinal, "second," as also was
> the case with the Old-English ancestor of "other."  Latin -ior is the
> ending of the non-neuter comparative. Therefore, if "alterior" had
> ever existed in Latin, it would have had to mean something like "more
> other than the other of two." But, of course, Latin already had a word
> that more or less expressed that concept: "alius," which meant, "the
> other(s) of more than two."

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=176

This was a post by the indefatigable eggcornista Ken Lakritz. I don't
believe Ken was seriously suggesting that "alterior" is etymologically
justified. Rather, he was performing the usual eggcornological
thought-experiment of imagining what sort of semantic justification
the eggcorn user might have. In this case, "alter-" is commonly
understood to mean 'other, different' (Ken made no mention of Latin)
thanks to "alter ego" and "alternative" (as in "alternative
lifestyle", "alternative newspaper", etc.). So it's not far-fetched to
imagine that an "alterior motive" is construed, in Ken's words, as "a
motive other than the manifest or acknowledged one."


--Ben Zimmer

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