[Ads-l] A tricky eggcorn

[Laurence Horn]

In 1939, Alfred Hitchcock was working on the movie Rebecca in uneasy collaboration with the producer David O. Selznick, the two sparring over the production in a variety of major and minor ways, as revealed in a series of messages back and forth between them that appear in the supplementary material on the DVD.  At one point, Hitchcock lectures Selznick on what he, Hitchcock, takes to be the “light motif” of the movie, as he puts it, and it occurred to me I’d never seen that in print—a sort of eggcornish reconstruction of the German. A Leitmotif, pronounced very much like “light motif” mutates mutants (as my autocorrect puts it) is literally a leading theme, nothing to do with light.  It’s all over the web in various contexts, but most (not all) of the ones I find *do* have something to do with light or its properties or uses, suggesting the meaning has been reconstrued as well. Whence the trickiness.  But in some cases, one person's “light motif” or “light-motif” is clearly just another person’s (or another Mensch’s) leitmotif, as in:  

[Re “Edward Scissorhands”] The implementation of dynamics, instruments, and the harmonic resonance of a voiceless choir accompany the moving image in contrasting between Edward's world and suburbia. These are developed through two very different and distinct motifs. A vivid light motif of Edward's world can be heard throughout the film.

In other cases, it’s hard to tell, and possibly even a source of puns:

"The identification with the divine was later associated with the light-motif of the menorah.”

Anyway, I don’t see “light(-)motif” for “leitmotif” in the EEDB index.

LH

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