More on "calvary"

[Wilson Gray]

As a former "irrevalent" - or however one wishes to spell it -
speaker, I doubt that "irreverent" has anything to do with it. Damned
if I have any other theory to account for it, though.

-Wilson

On 4/24/07, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: More on "calvary"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 10:11 AM -0700 4/24/07, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
> >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.
> >
> Note along the same lines "irrevelant" for "irrelevant".  77,700 hits
> for the former, many of them not prescriptive tracts bemoaning the
> malapropism.  Of course here there's no "irrevelant" to confuse it
> with, but the influence of "irreverent" may be not entirely
> irrelevant.  Along the l/r lines, there's also "heffalump" for
> "elephant", mutatis mutandis.
>
> LH
>
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