The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

The _salchow_, sometimes referred to as _Salchow jump_ is a figure skating jump named after the Swedish figure skater Ulrich Salchow (1877-1949). Occasionally, we find the rarer form _sowchow_.

Names for athletic moves and maneuvers don’t really have to make much sense. Eggcorn users may be satisfied to suppose that the term is an obscure or jocular allusion to sows and cows.

The error can occur in other languages than English — a pan-linguistic eggcorn? This is from a young figure skater writing in French, who, however, is unsure of the spelling:

> Je suis un garçon et je fais du patin depuis 3 ans. Je fait le sowchow (je pense que ça s’écrit comme ça), le saut de valse, saut de lapin, cherry flip. Je suis rendu à l’étape 4 et j’ai eu ma première médaille d’or il y a moins de 3 semaines, à Longueuil. C’était ma 2ème compétition.

It’s easy to see the source of the reanalysis… everyone knows that ‘hound’ is nearly synonymous with ‘dog’… and the eggcorners can’t really be blamed since (I think) ‘hund’ means dog (in German?)

(I also discovered from some pet owners’ forum that other misspellings/shortenings are ‘dotsen’ and ‘doxen’. I can’t see the logic behind the first, since they’re not usually spotted, but perhaps the second has something to do with the sound of ‘dogs’? Or perhaps those two are just short-forms, rather than genuine mistakes. But ‘dashound’ certainly seems to be a widespread, eggcorny error. ‘Dashhound’ is less common, but it exists…)

_[2006-05-24, CW: Closed comments on this entry because of targetted spamming.]_

A cross-language eggcorn, first brought to my attention by David Fenton in soc.motss (on 28 August 2004), who recalled the “pre-fix menu” he encountered at a D.C. restaurant a few years ago. Well, the cost is fixed ahead of time, right? Slightly Frenchier is “pre-fixe”, as in the example above. I reported these sightings in Postcards from Eggcornea on Language Log.

Here in Palo Alto, the University South News (written by Elaine Meyer) noted on 11 February 2005:

About Language. The advertisement for a prefix dinner is back! But it has improved: it is now a pre-fixe dinner. Optimists that we are, we celebrate progress, no matter how modest.

—–

Rationalizing the modifier as a participle (or, possibly, “restoring” the deleted past participle suffix) then gives us “prefixed”. Ed Keer reported wryly to ADS-L on 17 December 2004: “On my lunch walk today I passed a restaurant advertising “prefixed menu.” I don’t know what they have against bare roots.”

[Jeanette Winterson writes:

In New York I passed a Vietnamese restaurant with a board offering a Pre Fix Menu. I went inside to ask about this, and was told what you’d expect about the food prices, so I asked why they called it a Pre Fix. “Yeah,” said the guy, “we fix the Specials of the Day every morning, but before we fix those, we fix the set menu of the day, so that’s why it’s called a Pre Fix.” So now you know.

B.Z.]

The standard form can also be spelled with the original acute accent: _éclair_.

_Locusts_, mainly in the abstract singular _the locust of …_, have entered figurative language via the biblical reference to the destructive swarms that consumed the crops in Egypt (the eighth of the ten plagues), and the locusts of the apocalypse. The metaphor for an overwhelming, all-devouring force is found in modern Christian-revivalist wrtiting, as in:

* _I will raise up an army of disciples and apostles in you. Ambassadors of Christ, minister’s of reconciliation. They will enter the land with a sound of preparation and restoration. They will restore the years that the locust of war have devoured. Mighty peacemakers will come from you Yugoslavia._ (link)
* _The fruit of hard parental labor was devoured by the locust of humanistic values, never to yield a truly bountiful harvest for the Lord._ (link)

From there it is only a step to a secular metaphor:

* _Pakistan was still in its first innocence, the fervour and idealism of independence lingering in the air and the locust of military rule that was to descend on the land soon – never really to leave – the last thing on anyone’s mind._ (link)

The expression _a locust of …_ also came to denote “a great number of”, maybe via the metonymy _locust»swarm_, as suggested by Nathan Bierma in his article of November 10, 2004, for the Chicago Tribune:

> Election night is when newscasters turn off their teleprompters and let their language run wild. Analyst David Gergen commented to CNN’s Lou Dobbs that Ohio and Florida were host to a “locust of lawyers” (using “locust” to mean “swarm,” because locusts swarm — columnist George Will had used the term “locust litigation”).

Other rather more obscure occurences of _a locust of …_ may be linked to this sense:

* _Is Arnold capable of leading this state, let alone this country… let alone this generation? I say no — but not because he is a Republican or that he will lead a locust of special interests into California._ (link)
* _I often day dream I have magical powers, sort of like Matilda. I would make people do funny things, start a locust of little teeny-tiny yellow fuzzy baby chicks and make a dessert buffet table appear out of nowhere._ (link)

None of these considerations explain the substitution _locus»locust_, but they provide an already rather fuzzy backdrop for it.