Sashay eggcorn?

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 28, 2007, at 7:35 AM, James Smith wrote:

> Where's the eggcorn?  _sachet_ makes no sense here.
>
>
> --- neil <neil at TYPOG.CO.UK> wrote:
>
>> From an online review of Horace Si[l]ver's "Silver's
>> Serenade"
>> (www.cduniverse.com)
>>
>> Supported by a quintet that features trumpeter Blue
>> Mitchell and saxophonist
>> Junior Cook on the front line, Silver sachets his
>> way through five finely
>> crafted numbers with the style and grace of, well,
>> fine silver.
>>
>> Surely 'sashay'?

that was my reaction too.  this looks like a type of spelling error
in which the writer spells a less familiar word, w1,  with a more
familiar homophone, w2, without connecting the meaning of w2 to the
context of w1.

but this example isn't entirely clear.  maybe the writer made some
connection to the elegant scent of sachet.

i don't think there's a standard name for the sort of spelling error
described above.  i've recently been calling one class of them
"pails", from the (fairly common) spelling "beyond the pail" for
"beyond the pale".  the writer has heard the expression, recognizes
it as some sort of idiom (which therefore doesn't have to make sense
compositionally), and spells it as having the most familiar noun
pronounced /pel/ in it.  (one "beyond the pail" writer has recounted
this process for me.  "pale" would never have occurred to him,
because "pale" is an adjective, so "beyond the pale" would be
syntactically ill-formed as well as semantically opaque.  he was
fascinated by the history of the expression.)

arnold

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org