pawn off

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 6/22/07, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> a friend just wrote with an "eggcorn sighting":
>
> My June 25 New Yorker came today ... on p. 96 we have
>
> "Audiences, too, may have recoiled when they watched
> the first episode [of 'John from Cincinnati'], and thought,
> Hey, don't try to =pawn this off= on me."
>
> -----
>
> the OED (Dec. 2005 draft revision)  has this from 1763 on (up through
> 2003), mostly from elevated sources.  it says "= PALM v. 2. Usu. with
> off, upon", which  might be a suggestion that it started as an error
> for PALM.  but the PALM subentry has its first cite from 1830.

Note, however, that the early cites (1763, 1787) are actually for
"palm upon". The first OED cite for "palm off (on/upon)" is from 1832.

> it's probably just that the PALM entry hasn't been revised yet.
>
> but is this supposed to be an error that's become standard?  the
> development of a specialized sense of PALM OFF (ON) is easy enough to
> understand, but it's not so easy to see how PAWN OFF (ON) would pick
> up this sense independently.

MWDEU says "The OED thinks it erroneous for _palm_, but it may in fact
be a dialectal variant." Garner doesn't mention it, but Brians treats
it as a straightforward error:

http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/pawnoff.html


--Ben Zimmer

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