Eggcorn?

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 3, 2007, at 7:29 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> At 12:39 AM -0400 8/3/07, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>  >From  MacUpdates comments:
>>
>> "If the author cleans up that one glitch, then I'll make a _b-line_
>> for his app."
>>
>> -Wilson
>> --
> That's great.  I don't even see any motivation for it--unless the
> writer had a particular analysis in mind, "b-line" strikes me as
> pretty opaque, although presumably for him/her no more so than
> "bee-line".

i agree with larry; the writer's version is probably just as opaque
to him as "bee-line" would be.

this is a fairly common error type, involving a part X of an
expression that can be parsed out but can't be easily assigned a
meaning: in [bi]-LINE, LINE is a recognizable lexical item, but what
is [bi]?  (the name of the letter B?  the verb BE?  the noun BEE?
the proper name BEA?  something unique to this expression?)

if you can think of an item pronounced like X or something close to
it that that would seem to contribute some sense to the whole
expression, then interpreting the expression as containing that item
and spelling the expression accordingly produces an eggcorn (or, of
course, gets you the right analysis and spelling).

on the other hand, if you're stumped about the identity of X -- that
is, if the larger expression seems irretrievably idiomatic to you --
you can just pick some existing item Y pronounced like X, ideally one
of the right sort of category to fit where X occurs (so, for [bi]-
LINE, a noun), and you'll probably be biased towards picking a
frequent word, or one with a short spelling, or maybe you'll pick one
at random.  the result is a type of error i'm now calling a "pail",
after the (very common) spelling "beyond the pail", where the
baffling noun pronounced [pel] is taken to represent the everyday
noun "pail"; yes, it doesn't make sense, but then idioms are like
that.  (i'm paraphrasing my son-in-law here, who used the "pail"
spelling in his blog a while back, was astounded to discover that the
spelling was supposed to be "pale" and even more astounded to read
about the history of the expression.  his actual words: "For better
or worse, it's an idiom I picked up and I use it as a whole.  I don't
know where I picked up the pail spelling but I considered it an idiom
and thus seemingly odd spellings or disjoint meanings are not beyond
reason...")

in any case, i take "b-line" to be a pail rather than an eggcorn.

(let me stress, once again, that the stories i told above about
eggcorns and pails are stories about the genesis of these errors.
once the incorrect interpretations and spellings are out there, other
people pick them up.  for these later users, these interpretations
and spellings are just the way things are, and they either make some
sense, in the case of the eggcorns, or they're just odd idioms, in
the case of the pails.)

while i'm doing things that aren't eggcorns, let me remind you of an
exchange between michael quinion and me back in may, on "DO NOT USE
THE ESCALATOR IN THE ADVENT OF FIRE" (an example contributed to
michael's World Wide Words list), with "advent" for "event".  i said
at that time (may 24):

>  i'm inclined to see it as a simple confusion of phonologically and
> semantically similar words, like flaunt/flout, militate/mitigate,
> flounder/founder, etc.  (incidentally, it would be nice to have a
> technical term for these confusions.  let me suggest "flounders".)

flounders are the counterpart of ordinary classical malapropisms
("ordinary" meaning: not of the eggcorn subtype).  in both flounders
and -- let me continue this frenzy of naming with yet another term --
pineapples ("He is the very pineapple [pinnacle] of politeness", from
mrs. malaprop herself), an incorrect word E is substituted for a
phonologically similar word T, but in flounders, the error word E and
the target word T also overlap semantically, while in most pineapples
E and T are semantically distant.  obviously, there's some room here
for borderline cases.

flounders and pineapples as a set (floundapples?) are distinguished
from pails and eggcorns as a set (pailcorns?) in that the former
involve confusions of wholes, while the latter involve confusions of
parts of (at least partially) fixed expressions.

for those of you who like squares of oppositions, the story so far
can be summarized as:

    Flounders   --     Pineapples
        |                              |
    Pails            --      Eggcorns

all four types involve relationships between meaningful elements of
some sort, a characteristic that distinguishes them from simple
spelling errors like "loose" for "lose" or "there" for "their".
though writers are often exhorted not to "confuse" expressions like
"its" and "it's", there's no confusion going on in such errrors: the
identities of the expressions involved -- that is, the pairings of
pronunciation and meaning that they represent -- are perfectly clear
to the writers; their problem is the link between the expressions and
their spellings.  the four types above (usually) can be detected
through what look like non-standard spellings, but they aren't
orthographic errors at root.

(it would be nice to have a term that picks out these four types as a
set, and distinguishes them from simple spelling errors and from
aberrant pronunciations, like "retart" for "retard", and aberrant
meanings, like "ritzy" taken to mean 'cheap, trashy'.  but my
terminology machine is worn out for today.)

a reminder: all this is about "advertent" errors, or what geoff
nunberg has called "thinkos" (vs. "typos", extending that term to
include all sorts of inadvertent errors, including fay/cutler
malapropisms, word retrieval errors based on semantics, inadvertent
blends, telescopings, transpositions, omissions, perseverations,
anticipations, and more).  a further reminder: the "same" production
can represent different things in different contexts.   one person's
general practice can be another person's momentary lapse.

(well, i've been meaning to write this stuff up for the Language
Log.  i guess this is a draft.)

arnold

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