Sashay eggcorn?

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:26 AM -0700 6/28/07, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>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.)
>
I'm not sure about this.  Even if one only knew "pale" as an
adjective and wasn't familiar with the pale of settlement (or even
the 'fence stake' or 'staked fence' meanings), might one not have
guessed that the expression was (noncompositionally) "beyond the
pale" (with some sort of substantival use of the adjective) rather
than the even more opaque "beyond the pail"?  After all, in "a whiter
shade of pale" (as in the Procol Harum song), we probably don't find
the eggcorn (or whatever) "a whiter shade of pail".

Oops, just googled the latter and found a number of serious hits (not
counting the spoofs).  Never mind.  But I would still suppose that a
lot of people who write "beyond the pale" in the conventional way are
processing it as a kind of tacit eggcorn involving the adjective.

LH

LH

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