The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

The first cite is in a New York Times Magazine article. Googling on “strum up support” gets you a fair number of cites having to do with music-making, but also some, like the ones above, that don’t.

I wouldn’t have thought that the idiom “drum up” was so opaque that re-shaping was called for or that the sense of “strum up” (vs. down) used with reference to playing musical instruments would be salient to obtaining a goal by persistent effort, but the examples are out there.

[Addendum: Doug Harris on ADS-L, 13 June 2007, attempting to rationalize the eggcorn (which he hadn’t heard before), writes that it “makes perfect sense if referring to the effort stringed-instrument-bearing buskers, flower children and the like do to allow them to continue the lifestyle they’ve chosen.”]

The original expression is “just grew like Topsy,” referring to Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who “jes grew.” As the original referent of “Topsy” becomes less and less familiar, the term has been reanalyzed by some as “top seed,” which sounds like something that might grow quickly.

Parish reported on ADS-L: “In this morning’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, there’s an AP story on Sen. Harry Reid, who accepted a questionable gift from the Nevada Athletic Commission. Kathleen Clark, an expert on congressional ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, is quoted as saying” the first cite above. Parish added: “If it’s a deliberate coinage - above being approached? - it strikes me as halfway clever, but there’s a definite eggcornish flavor to it.”

Eliminating duplicates, I found 88 Google webhits for “X above approach”, where X is a form of be. Most of them are relevant, and almost all of those look inadvertent.

“Above approach” is certainly a malaprop, with the relatively rare “reproach” replaced by the very common “approach”, but I’ve marked this one as “questionable” as an eggcorn because I’m not sure how approaching enters into the perceived meaning of the idiom, especially with reference to abstractions rather than persons. However, the last of the “above approach” cites, with its explanation that “no one can come” [i.e. approach] and question the writer’s manner of life, suggests a possible contribution. And maybe the development of “beyond approach” provides an explanation.

The “beyond approach” webhits include many like the last cite above, in which the expression seems to mean ‘beyond approaching, unapproachable, first-order’ (similar to “beyond compare” ‘beyond comparison, incomparable, first-order’), with no possible reproaching alluded to — presumably the malaprop “beyond approach” reinterpreted more or less literally. The next-to-last cite could go either way, and might represent an intermediate step on the way to literal reinterpretation.

Jeanette Winterson writes:

The other day my elderly country neighbour asked for a bit of help to get his new washing machine into the kitchen. That generation never use “it”, always, “he” or “she”, so I wasn’t surprised to hear the washing machine called “he”, but I was surprised by what followed: “My old washing machine, he’s given up the goat,” he said, in a broad Gloucestershire accent.
“The goat?” I replied. “Are you sure?” “Oh, yes,” said my neighbour, “ain’t you never heard that expression before, given up the goat?” “Well, not exactly . . . where does it come from?” “Ah well,” said my neighbour, “in the old days, when folks didn’t have much, and mainly worked the land, a man would set store by his animals, especially his goat, and when he come to die, he would bequeath that goat to his heirs, and that is why we say, ‘he’s given up the goat’.”
I am thrilled with this and from now on there will be no more ghosts, only goats.

The substitution of oaks for oats in this expression is sometimes used as a joke (though note that two of the examples above involve jokes about “crops” that actually make less sense with oaks). It’s possible that this eggcorn appears more frequently in dialects where postvocalic stops like /t/ and /k/ are glottalized, though the /k/-/t/ alternation is not uncommon in wider usage (see, for instance, buck naked » butt naked). The last example (provided by slangologist Grant Barrett) is a double eggcorn, combining the oaks substitution with sow » soar (a non-rhotic substitution like sought after » sort after).

See also soak one’s wild oats.