honcho > honcha

[Charles Doyle]

A small terminological quibble here, regarding an issue that sometimes causes confusion (even exasperation) in discourse between folklorists and other scholars (as well as journalists and the public at large): As folklorists use the epithet "folk," the term "folklore," or generic designations like "legend," "myth" (not the same as "legend"!), "rumor," and "superstition," there is no implication of 'falsity'.  (Nor does "folk" specify the old-fashioned and the rustic, a la the demographic category in the linguistic atlases; EVERY human being belongs to several overlapping "folk groups.") An urban legend, for example (nowadays the term "contemporary legend" is often preferred) may be completely fictional, partly factual, or entirely true in a factual sense (as well, of course, in a more abstract symbolic or functional sense).

Most readers of this list, I expect, are familiar with David Wilton's _Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends (OUP, 2004)--a valuable book despite the title!

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 10:06:07 -0500
>From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>Subject: Re: honcho > honcha

>
>At 9:29 AM -0500 2/1/07, Amy West wrote:

>>A bit more discussion on the topic. I find Charlie Doyle's response interesting as it shows two different senses of "folk etymology." I guess the first sense, the non-linguist sense, could also be called "false etymology" like the false origin stories passed around about "posh" and "tip" and "blackmail" (oh, that last one drives me nuts).
>>
>>---Amy
>
>--and "picnic", which is even worse.  I agree, and I've suggested (e.g. in my American Speech paper from 2004, "Spitten image: Etymythology and Fluid Dynamics") distinguishing the the first category as etymythologies (essentially etymological urban legends), as opposed to first-order or folk/false etymologies, which involve a(relatively) simple invention of transparency.
>
>Larry Horn

>>>
>>>Date:    Wed, 31 Jan 2007 09:29:06 -0500
>>>From:    Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
>>>Subject: Re: honcho > honchas
>>>
>>>Hey, Amy:  That is, indeed, a "fundamental" question--but neither "stupid" nor "obvious"! And your second paragraph eloquently responds to your own question.
>>>
>>>We folklorists sometimes cringe when we hear the word "folk" bandied about by the lay public or scholars in other disciplines.
>>>
>>>As it happens, I'll be giving a talk this spring (at the Western States Folklore Society conference) that bears on this subject.  At the risk of tedium, I'm going to copy the first 70% of my abstract here, just below my name.
>>>
>>>--Charlie
>>>
>>><< Folklorists have often assumed that "dialect" can be regarded as a category of folklore.  Most dialect features, however--even though they are certainly oral and traditional, and they exhibit some degree of variation--have no standing as folklore per se, because folklore texts must be consciously produced artifacts, which a member of a folk group will intentionally and optionally "perform." Dialect, on the other hand, is simply the way somebody talks, unselfconsciously for the most part.
>>>
The aspects of speech that hold interest for folklorists, then, are not a group's normal phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical behaviors but rather its traditional, albeit personally crafted, verbal expressions--oral artifacts (if that word is not oxymoronic as applied to folklore). One category of such artifacts is folk etymology, though not in the sense that linguists use the term--the historical process by which the structure or use of a word has been affected by an erroneous perception of the word's origin--but rather in the sense of a performed explanation, believed or disbelieved, of how a word originated, and (especially) legends, riddling questions, and jokes about the origin. >>
>>>_____________________________________________________
>>>
>>>---- Original message ----
>>>
>>>>Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 08:22:28 -0500
>>>>From: Amy West <medievalist at W-STS.COM>
>>>>Subject: Re: honcho > honchas
>>>>
>>>>Again, I fear I am asking a stupid, fundamental, obvious question that is firmly grounded in my deep ignorance:
>>>>
Can we understand folk etymology as yet another instance of the constant reanalysis of the language that speakers perform on the language?
>>>>
>>>>If not, what's the current linguistic understanding of what "folk etymology" is?
>>>>
>>>>---Amy West

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