More on "calvary"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Apr 24, 2007, at 8:38 AM, Rosemarie wrote:

> ...Besides the misspelling, I believe this is a malaproprism, since
> the
> military fighting unit is a "cavalry" and not a "calvary."

it's in most of the standard sources -- Brians, MWDEU, Garner, etc.
-- as a common error.

> ... None of the 10 entries, in fact, gives any military  connection
> whatsoever.
> The only connection I can think of between a  cavalry and a
> calvary, is that
> having a cavalry charge at you might induce  extreme suffering,
> mental and
> otherwise!

surely not a semantic confusion, but a spelling error:  the two words
have the same seven letters in different orders.  in fact, they both
begin with CA and end with RY, and the troublesome part comes in the
middle (which is generally the least salient part of a word, unless
the middle part is accented, which it's not in this case).

what makes the error like a (classical) malapropism is that it's a
confound of two existing words.

but there seems to be some contribution of phonological difficulty;
the L-R (the hyphen indcates a syllable division) is a bit
troublesome, so that there's some temptation to move the L out of the
way, giving CALVARY (with a more favored syllable structure -- *and*
it's an existing word) or CAVLARY (600 or so hits; V-L isn't as good
as L-V, but it's not so bad) or, moving the L back instead of
forward, CAVARLY (some hits, hard to estimate how many because this
occurs as a proper name; R-L is better than L-R, and the result ends
in the very common final syllable LY).

you can see the phonological effect independent of the existing-word
effect by looking at misspellings of CHIVALRY.  quite a few (9k or
so) for CHILVARY, with L-V; 800 or so for CHIVLARY, with V-L; and 600
or so for CHIVARLY, with R-L.  none of these alternative spellings is
an existing word.

the spelling of unaccented vowels is an independent variable.  there
are a modest number of misspellings of CALVARY as CALVERY and of
CHIVALRY as CHIVELRY.

arnold

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