The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

There is no obvious semantic link between the noun ilk “sort, kind” and the animal of the family Cervidae, so this substitution surprises at first and cast doubt on its status as a genuine eggcorn.

Occurrences of X and his/her/their elk are, however, readily found in online writing, and some of them are clearly systematic and non-accidental: The writer for Leadership Nigeria employs the expression no less than 5 times.

On Language Log, reporting on Nancy Friedman’s original Sarah Palin example, Ben Zimmer offers some thoughts on what may be going on here:

There’s nothing in the comment to suggest that this substitution was the result of intentional wordplay, but it’s hard not to think that the slip was influenced by Palin’s well-documented love of hunting big game in Alaska like moose and caribou. […] And perhaps the commenter is from a part of the country where milk is pronounced as [mɛlk] (say, Pittsburgh, Utah, or Washington State), rendering ilk and elk homophonous, or nearly so. Add the fact that ilk is a low-frequency word that lingers in crystallized idiomatic usage (”of X’s ilk,” “X and his/her/its/their ilk”), and it’s clear to see that this is a prime candidate for eggcornization.

Meanwhile in the Eggcorn Forum, our regular contributor Kem Luther finds a particular affinity between Sarah Palin and the ilk>elk eggcorn, thereby strengthening Ben Zimmer’s point of a Palin -> Alaska -> elk connection:

• And it is Palin and her elk that are running everyone else out of the republican party. (Reader comment on Talking Points Memo)
• i would rather be in hell first, than have anything to do with Christians like Sarah Palin and her Elk. (Castlebar.ie forum)

This is notwithstanding the fact that Cervus canadensis is not specifically typical for Alaska. On the other hand, British English admits elk for the animal called moose in American English - compare with Elch in German - and it should be noted that some of the cites are from British and Irish sources. (More on this topic in Bill Poser’s LL post.)

But to paraphrase commenter marie-lucie on Ben Zimmer’s article, if there is Artemis and her stag, why not Sarah Palin and her elk?

As the examples, show, however, the substitution is more than a Palin-specific nonce-eggcorn. It may still be questionable, used by writers who pronounce ilk as [ɛlk] ans spell it phonetically; or it may reflect a genuine ideation of a cervid stand-in for the extension of the person who is the target of the speaker’s, or writer’s, finger-pointing.

Once in a while I select an eggcorn because it appears in the seach terms of visitors to this site (the Eggcorn Database & associated forums). When I saw “youthamism” ranked 15th both for the month of August 2009 and for the enitre year to date, it seemed to me that something of interest was happening here.

Peter Forster’s forum post, which attracted all these visits, lists two innovations: youthamism as noted here, and the less eggcornish euthamism (usually in effect a creative error for euthanaisa, maybe triggered by the less common -sia suffix). The variant youthanism can be found, too, indeed at a higher frequency than youthamism. Both, as eggcornish substitutions for euphemism, rely on an association of coy camouflage of offending words with youth.

However, youthanism and to a lesser degree youthamism can occur in situations of questionable eggcorn status, in the sense of “youth slang” — a blendoid reshaping of euphemism, most likely:

• You have to limit yourself on how many “get her done” and “gag me with a spoon” you can have in your life. Youthamism are just that, for the youth to use, no honest adult should fall for the MTV trappings. (link)
• Can we start calling young slang “youthanisms”? (link)
• Reading numerous reviews of this hotel posted here is mystifying, many contrasting comments like “smells of urine” or “sparsely furnished,“ to such superlatives as “immaculate” and youthanisms like “Plush,” demonstrating that this hotels appeal is not bound by any generational gaps. (link)

Last, for reasons that are not clear, we find cites where youtha(n|m)ism is employed in the sense of “quote” or “maxim”:

• I am doing a speech why Sir Paul McCartney should be on the 4th plynth in London..whatare some famous quotes? like quotes to help persuade people to have him up there. My teacher is fairly old - around 50-60 and likes old, famous quotes E.g. She likes the quote “lend me your ears” by William Shakespeare. Any youthanisms would be good. (link)
• need some help here… I need to know some youthanisms. I typed it into the search engine Google but it came up with nothing… By youthanisms i mean something like “I want to live life to it’s fullest” “I want to live out my time” “I want to live my 9 lives” That kind of stuff… (link)

An imprimatur — the Latin can be translated as let it be printed — was originally an official license to print or publish, granted by the Roman Catholic church, thereby declaring the work in question as compatible with Roman Catholic doctrine. The word is used by extension to refer to any official endorsement, or even more widely, any kind of (emphatic) approval. The semantic link with premature is that for a work that requires some institution’s imprimature, it would be premature to publish it until the imprimatur has been granted.

Impremature can also be found substituting for the word imprint — a particular publisher’s brand or label — as for example in:

“Chances are good that someone–perhaps Salon, Huffington Post, the Daily Beast–will pick up Froomkin’s column and keep it going. Of course, it won’t quite be the same. It won’t have the Washington Post’s impremature on it.” (link)

What may be happening here is that the two rather learned terms imprimatur and imprint (both obviously close etymological relatives) blend in some speakers’ vocabulary, and the imprimatur>impremature substitution extends out to imprint.

Cacophony, from Greek κακός (kakos, “bad”) + φωνή (phonē, “voice”), has been around in English since the mid-1600s at least, according to Merriam-Webster. Analogous words with close to the same sense exist in French (cacophonie), Spanish (cacofonía), German (Kakofonie), Norwegian (kakofoni) and many other languages.

Coughing, as Peter Forster notes in his Eggcorn forum post, “makes a harsh and discordant noise, and it seems reasonable to suppose that those using a ‘cacoughany’ spelling may have made some association between the two and have entered, therefore, eggcorn territory.” When cacoughany refers to a specific sound the word can be understood as describing it as as harsh and unpleasant as coughing.

There are quite a few other spelling variants, such as cacoughony (which looks eggcornish) or cacoffini (which looks more like spelling-by-ear, without any plausible link to coffin).

Michael Covarrubias noted this eggcorn in his August 2, 2009 posting on the American Dialect Society’s listserv, overhearing ep. 2 of season 1 of the show Coach (I dropped on my knees, curled up in the feeble position, closed my eyes and screamed my head off). He also noted that googling “the feeble position” returns a number of hits from skateboarding sites and discussion, where the phrase seems to refer to a position of the board perched on the edge of a ramp.

If a person is said to be placed (often: “curled up”) in the fetal position, this generally carries a sense beyond the mere positioning of the rump and limbs, but also signifies a state of extreme weakness and vulnerability. Feeble is an adjective close to this sense. The substitution of [b] for the flapped t in fetal — its usual realization in American English — is an easy change to make.