The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

It is only very rarely that we enter non-eggcorns into the database, but I am making an exception for ad homonym.

First of all, homonyms — or rather, homophones, i.e. words that sound alike but aren’t necessarily spelled alike — enter into the genesis of eggcorns themselves.

Second, because the ad homonym malapropism illustrates very nicely what elements are required to make an eggcorn: it is a non-standard reshaping of an established term (check!), homonym and hominem are pronounced nearly the same (check!), but it isn’t a re-interpretation that is based on (a correct understanding of the semantics of) the target word homonym.

In a typical eggcorn, the writer understands the sense of the word he or she actually employs; the problem is that the use takes up the place already occupied by a different word, often part of a set phrase. Here, however, the eggcorn users don’t give any sign that they know what a homonym is. In one of the examples, the writer obviously believes that ad homonym means against the man in Latin. It’s the Latin that is faulty, along with the recollection of what the expression is supposed to be, precisely. (And spell-checkers might have had their bit to add, too. Case in point: the spell-checker I just used on this entry didn’t know hominem and suggested hominid. Ad hominid also yields over a hundred Google hits, compared to several thousand for ad homonym(s).)

The replacement of a “complicated phrase” by another “complicated phrase” is rarely an eggcorn: often, the writer is unclear about the meaning of both, not only about the original.

One of the simple pleasures of Italian home-style cooking is the style of fricasseeing meat — most often chicken, though other meats can be treated in the same way — called, in Italian, alla cacciatora ‘hunter’s style’ or cacciatore or cacciatora (in French, chasseur). In food writing in English, cacciatore seems to be the most common variant, and there’s an alternative spelling cacciatori, in which the common pronunciation of word-final unaccented -e as /i/ in English is carried over into the spelling.

But four other spellings are not infrequent in English, and all involve the reshaping of the first syllable as catch; the spellings vary in how the medial unaccented vowel is spelled (i or a) and how the final vowel is spelled (e or i). All four are illustrated above. No doubt some of these occurrences are simply attempts at phonetic spelling in English, but I would imagine that at least some of these writers connect the word to the verb (or noun) catch: first you catch the chicken (or whatever), then you cook it. This would be lovely etymologically, since the English verb catch and the Italian verb cacciare ‘hunt’ have a common source in Latin capti:re ’seize’.

I have frequently heard this in spoken use (as in “we have to submit an in-term report after 6 months and a final report at the end of the project”), but was never quite sure if this was just a mispronunciation. However, a Google search turned up 105 examples of “in-term report”, showing that at least some people believe this is the correct spelling. There were 4,460,000 hits for “interim report”. The eggcorn version does make intuitive sense - it sounds like a report that one writes within the term of a project, as opposed to a final report that you write when the project is finished. The actual derivation is of course from Latin, “ad interim” = “in the mean time”.

[Edited and posted, CW, 2005/11/14.]

Clique’s etymology, according to OED.com:

[recent a. F. clique, not in Cotgr., but quoted by Littré of 15th c. in sense ‘noise, clicking sound’, f. cliquer to click, clack, clap. Littré says that in the modern sense it is originally the same as claque band of claqueurs. (This word has no derivative in French; in English it has originated many.)]

One of the entries for “click” is:

Anglicized form of CLIQUE (sense 1)..

This is hard because I’m not certain what this falls into exactly. The meaning that “clique” had in Old French is not far off from the primary meaningof “click” (via OED, yet again):

A slight, sharp, hard, non-ringing sound of concussion, thinner than a clack, such as is made by the dropping of a latch, the cocking of a gun, etc. Also fig.

Is this an eggcorn that the OED has documented by stating “Anglicized form of CLIQUE (sense 1)”, or what? I first noticed it on irc.perl.org#catalyst, and the search for “in his|her|your|my |their click” came up with a lot of false positives. It does have a web presence, though (as the “Spotted in the Wild” show), but considering the information from OED and dictionary.com, I’m curious what others think.

[David Romano’s draft posted by CW, 2005/10/14. In my view this is one of those eggcorns that lead back in a circle to the original etymology. I suppose this usage of click is derived from the idea that these are the people one “clicks” with. Which appears to be the actual origin of clique, but it is unclear if the writers were aware of that.]

David Fenton asked Chris Waigl and me: “Is there a mixed usage of “en route”, “in route” and “on route” that is common, or am I hearing a connection between three independent phrases that doesn’t really exist?” It turns out that the “on” and “in” variants of the French “en” are very frequent indeed; raw Google web hits for “— route to” on 22 September 2005:

en route to: 5,930,000
on route to: 265,000
in route to: 192,000

A quick glance at a sampling of the “on” and “in” examples should convince anyone that these expressions are synonymous. The version with “in” translates the French literally. The version with “on” is an especially good translation of French “en”, since it occurs with the English noun “route” in expressions like “on the/our route to Vancouver” (where French “en” is just unacceptable, in writing or speech). Note the nice juxtaposition of “on route” with “on its route” in the first cite above, from the MSN Encarta dictionary’s entry for the noun “stop”. In any case, both “on” and “in” represent attempts to Anglicize, and make sense of, the French expression, and both are phonologically very close to French “en”.

This reshaping seems to have gotten by under almost everybody’s radar (neither of the Anglicized variants is in the current OED, and even Garner doesn’t complain about them), though at least two of the standard sources mention it: Brians instructs us not to Anglicize “en” in “en route” as “in”, and MWDEU has an unusually stern entry labeling “on route” as an “embarrassing error” and cautioning: “Authors and proofreaders beware.” (Brians doesn’t mention the “on” variant, and MWDEU doesn’t mention the “in” variant.) Despite them, I think that these variants are fast edging into the mainstream.

[CW, 2005/09/27: Added “on mass(e)”, as suggested by Sandi in the comment section. The partially Anglicised form “on masse” might simply be a misspelling of the French preposition en, though.]