Eggcorn: own goal >> home goal

[Mark Mandel]

I always found "own goal" obscure, not having grown up with sports in which
the term is used. (NB, Damien's UK "football" is Americans' "soccer".) And I
can't think of any other uses of the pronominal adjective (what DO you call
it?) "own" without a possessive, whether in "DET[non-pronom] own N" or any
other construction. AFAICT, "own goal" is an idiosyncratic construction.

OTOH, "home" meaning 'the goal that the player's team is trying to defend'
is a pretty easy step for me, drawing on the core concept of "home". So I
would find "home goal" not just on a par with "own goal", but preferable.

Mark Mandel


On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 11:22 AM, Damien Hall <djh514 at york.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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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