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lost » loss

Chiefly in:   no love loss

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • Now naturally, the Shiites, as you were saying earlier, have no love loss for the Iraqi leader President Saddam Hussein. (CNN transcript, Apr. 2, 2003)
  • For Red Sox fans, especially in New England, there is no love loss between the two teams. (New Paltz Oracle, Oct. 16, 2003)
  • Those games are always competitive and fiery and there is certainly no love loss between us. (Amherst College Athletics, Mar. 10, 2005)
  • No love loss between Williams and Sharapova. (Edinburgh News, June 29, 2005)
  • Really, no love loss between the two of you certainly now. (CNN transcript, Oct. 12, 2005)
  • Sobule has no love loss for the Bush administration. (WorldNetDaily, Feb. 16, 2006)
  • No love loss for Zhang Ziyi in Hong Kong. (USA Today, Mar. 27, 2006)
  • Mind you, I’ve got no love loss for Phoenix. (Arizona Daily Star, UA Fans Sports Blog, May 17, 2006)

The idiom “no love lost,” i.e., ‘no love that is lost,’ is reinterpreted as “no love loss,” i.e., ‘no loss of love.’ Since lost and loss are closely related, this eggcorn is rather subtle — so subtle that it has even worked its way into newspaper headlines (Edinburgh News, USA Today).

The reinterpretation may help to clarify the idiom, since “(there is) no love lost” has never been particularly transparent. As the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms explains, the expression actually had two contrary senses through the 18th century: implying either extreme affection or extreme dislike. The latter sense eventually won out.

In the Eggcorn Forum Sphinxie notes the reverse substitution from loss to lost, as in “I am sorry for your lost” (appearing frequently in online memorials and guest books).

| comment | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2006/05/18 |

knickers » nipples

Chiefly in:   get one's nipples in a twist

Classification: English – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • “You won’t get your nipples in a twist over our choice this month — there’s no debate how great this one is!” (link)
  • “Just don’t expect me to get my nipples in a twist over your caterwauling about some architecture.” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Michael Palmer (Usenet group soc.motss, 10 April 2006.)

Palmer pointed out a poster’s use of “Go on, get your nipples in a twist” earlier that day, adding that “Google(tm) provides 389 hits, as against 193,000 for the standard knickers (also, 1,430 for nickers, 79 for snickers, 154 for knockers, and 19 for niggers).” The (primarily) British idiom is undoubtedly opaque to American speakers unfamiliar with “knickers” ‘underpants’, and “nipples”, which is phonetically very close to “knickers”, makes some (painful) sense.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2006/05/15 |

ado » to do

Chiefly in:   much to do about nothing , without further to do

Variant(s):  to-do

Classification: English – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • “It is much to do about nothing because I’m sure it involved human error.” (link)
  • “Much To-Do About Nothing. Why the city’s homeless plan is far from “ambitious.” by Doron Taussig.” (link)
  • “So without further to do lets see what’s new in PHP 5.” (link)
  • “Suddenly, Marc Andreessen appeared on WWW-talk and, without further to-do, introduced an idea for the IMG tag by the Mosaic team.” (link)

First pointed out to me by Thomas Grano, who was searching for occurrences of “much” as a mass determiner and found “much to do about nothing” in his data .

The “much to do about nothing” version is very common indeed: ca. 33,800 raw Google webhits on 13 April 2006; under a thousand for the “without further to do” version. Well, “ado” is rare in modern English except in these two fixed expressions, and “to-do” ‘commotion, fuss’ (which has an etymology parallel to “ado”) fits the overall meaning of both “much ado about nothing” and “without further ado”.

| comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2006/05/02 |

cart » cat

Chiefly in:   put the cat before the horse

Classification: English – idiom-related – /r/-dropping

Spotted in the wild:

  • The feeling of the people is that the police stinks and it is rotten. You, within days of assuming the leadership of the force, announced what you regard as your reform programmes. Isn’t it like putting the cat before the horse? Why didn’t you carry out internal purge and cleansing first before this outward approach? (NigerianMuse, February 06, 2005)
  • A population policy that is not predicated on the result of a credible census, in our view, is tantamount to putting the cat before the horse. (THISDAYOnLine.com, Nov. 16, 2004)
  • Before deregulation, pundits had expected the Obasanjo government to put the nations infrastructures into good working order if not for anything to make the deregulation effective, unfortunately the present arrangement is akin to putting the cat before the horse. (Max Uba : Deregulation and the Empty Jerry Can, (Niger Delta Congress))
  • But perhaps to expect that the Attorney-General’s Office and the Government in general can eradicate corruption is to put the cat before the horse. (Daily Nation (Kenya), September 13, 1998)
  • I enjoyed this entry, but i think you put the cat before the horse. (Comment on online diary entry, Apr 9, 2001)

This eggcorn, which in some case might be a typo from omitting to hit one key, was reported by on the American Dialect Society mailing list by Mark Peters, who saw it in a student paper.

It seems to be most frequent in writings by people from Africa — maybe because the historical image of horse-drawn carts is less present there than in societies of European culture.

| 8 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2006/03/15 |

chase » cheese

Chiefly in:   cut to the cheese

Classification: English – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • Ho! Ho! Ho! Right, nae messin about, let’s cut to the cheese and deal with the facts. The real reason Rangers lost was because Celtic fans kept hiding the ball. (Evening Times (UK), Feb 15, 2006)
  • After about thirty minutes of being asked ridiculous questions about ridiculous things (where I got my MSCE, where I got my degree, what my teachers names were, etc), they cut to the cheese: Somebody called the shop and started spreading some serious subterfuge! (Neohapsis archives, Jul 09, 2004)
  • I’m looking for a primer, cut to the cheese type of book with some examples in C or assembly as talking about real-time is much easier than getting down and dirty. (comp.realtime, Aug 17, 1993)
  • Well, to cut to the cheese - what I hope to do with this post is to start a discussion about the features I’ve suggested below and also maybe get some new thoughts on the table. (rec.games.computer.ultima.dragons, Apr 15, 2000)

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms has the following about cut to the chase:

Get to the point, get on with it, as in We don’t have time to go into that, so let’s cut to the chase. This usage alludes to editing (cutting) film so as to get to the exciting chase scene in a motion picture. [Slang; 1920s]

I can only guess that the variant cut to the cheese relies on a similar idea, only related to food: a cheese course is usually served at the end of a meal.

| 6 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2006/03/06 |
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