of eggcorns and Eskimos

[Laurence Horn]

 From last Sunday's NYTBR (yes, I'm a week behind), in a review of TIm
Sandlin's new novel _Lydia_ by Mike Peed (imagine getting through
middle school with that name):

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At 58, she acts as if she's 20 and, of a benign nonagenarian,
gleefully quips, "Don't you admire the Eskimo ritual of leaving their
elderly behind on an ice flow?"
===========
Nice to be reminded that when they're not inventing new words for
"snow"--or "ice"--or rubbing noses, Eskimos are busy practice their
traditional ways of addressing the high cost of Medicare outlays.

Of course we don't know if it's Sandlin, her editor, Peed, or his
editor who's responsible for this, but "ice flow"--attested elsewhere
(although you have to work your way through the irrelevant examples
in which ice is in fact flowing)--joins the rank of similar
post-cluster oe > ow alterations already enshrined in the eggcorn
database, including but possibly not limited to "slow-eyed"/"slow
gin" and my favorite, the "throws of passion" (a promising title for
the autobiography of a pitcher who threw not wisely but too well).

A speculation: In each case, we may be seeing the tendency for
homonymy (especially involving a relatively unfamiliar and/or
somewhat obsolete word) to merge, or flow into, polysemy.  In some
cases, this seems like a fairly motivated reanalysis--"ice flow" for
"ice floe" perhaps being one--while in others, it may just be that
neither version ("throes/throws of passion") makes much sense to a
hearer, so why not assume it's just an unfamiliar sense of a familiar
word, which is certainly not a unique phenomenon?  Of course, I have
to acknowledge that the reverse tendency, reanalysis of polysemy as
homonymy (when the senses have sufficiently diverged) also occurs, as
indicated by conventionalized spelling contrasts:  "principle" vs.
"principal", "metal" vs. "mettle", etc.  But I think the homonymy >
polysemy direction is alive and well.

LH

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