Eggcorn: own goal >> home goal

[Damien Hall]

Spotted, a particularly British likely eggcorn in a Facebook status update:

[My friend, name obscured to protect the innocent] 'notes another
gob-smacking home-goal from the idiots.'

Given what I know of this friend, he is likely to be talking about
politics, though who these particular idiots are I don't know.

The eggcorn is in the substitution of 'home-goal' for the idiom I assume
was the target, 'own goal'. An own goal in football is a goal scored by a
player at the wrong end, which therefore counts for the opposition. I think
my friend has substituted 'home-goal' through a sense that scoring a goal
is something negative, that one does _against_ the other team, and you
therefore wouldn't want to do it to yourself, 'at home': _cf_ 'you don't
shit where you eat'. The original _own goal_ doesn't seem particularly
obscure to me (a goal scored in one's own goal as opposed to in the other
team's), but maybe the senses of 'own' and 'home' here are as obscure as
one another, leading to one of them not being obviously preferable over the
other.

Of course, there's a great deal of phonetic similarity between _home_ and
_own_. The vowel is the same; it's followed by a nasal in both words, and
both /m/ and /n/ may assimilate to the following velar /g/ and produce [N]
(engma) in fast speech; and there may be 'h-dropping' in _home_.

It's difficult to Google for other examples of this eggcorn, since 'home
goal' has at least two non-eggcorned senses as well: a goal scored by a
player at their team's home ground, and a small goal designed for use in
the garden of one's home. "home goal" on Google gets about 108,000 ghits,
and the first hundred all seem to be examples of one of these two
non-eggcorned senses.

Damien Hall

--
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
YO10 5DD
UK

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