The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Philip Jensen sent me the New Yorker quotation (from Nancy Franklin) by e-mail on 22 June 2007; a discussion then ensued on the American Dialect Society mailing list. A few days earlier, on 19 June, the Grammarphobia site coped with a complaint from a reader about this very expression: “One of my pet peeves is hearing people say “pawn off” when they mean “palm off.” Why do they say that?”

The most recent OED (December 2005 draft revision) has no usage note on the relevant subentry for “pawn”. It gives early cites (1763, 1787) for “pawn upon” — the first cite for “palm off (on/upon)” is from 1832 — and then cites (mostly from elevated sources) through 2003. MWDEU says the expression “would appear to have originated by similarity of sound to palm in palm off… but it may in fact be a dialectal variant.”

It turns out that OED1 and OED2 had an “Erron.” label on this usage, but that label has now been removed, presumably in recognition of the fact that, as we say here on the ecdb, the usage is “nearly mainstream”. Nevertheless, Paul Brians treats it as a straightforward error. (And Bryan Garner doesn’t mention it at all.)

Obviously, “pawn off” still rubs some people the wrong way, but there are others (like me) who don’t even notice it as worthy of comment.

[Thanks to Ben Zimmer and Jesse Sheidlower for supplying most of the information above.]

“Chute” ’sloping channel or slide to convey things downward (often for disposal)’ is a homophone of “shoot”, and since things often shoot along down a chute, “shoot” is a natural replacement for the otherwise unmotivated “chute” — so natural, indeed, that the New Oxford American Dictionary (2nd ed.) lists it as an alternative to “chute”. The third citation, from a U.K. rivers site, probably shows some influence of the verb “shoot” in “shoot the rapids”.

This one’s not in the standard lists of often-confused words.

In this eggcorn, the reanalysis is evident only in the way the word is punctuated. The original form, sing-along, is quite transparent, so I suspect that the reanalysis is not motivated by the sense of the word so much as by analogy with “V-a-N” constructions such as Rent-A-Wreck, rope-a-dope, and whack-a-mole.

I’ve labelled this one as “nearly mainstream,” because the reanalyzed form seems to be very common. As of this writing, the query “sing-a-long gets approximately a third as many hits on Google as the query “sing-along”, although it should be noted that, since Google treats hyphens and spaces as interchangeable, the hit counts will include things like “I run out of air if I have to sing a long note” and “Feel free to sing along.”

Another confounding factor here is an outfit called Sing-a-long-a, which puts on sing-along screenings of the film The Sound of Music (”the ultimate communal nun-based karaoke“). These events go under the official title Sing-a-Long-a Sound of Music, but the second “-a” is often omitted by reviewers, as in this article by Beth Nissen at CNN.com.

On October 25, 2005, our contributor Kaz Vorpal entered the putative substitution supe up»soup up in the database, with the following note:

When you supe up a car, you are making the car super, or supercharging it. Not adding a liquified meal.

The supercharger was patented in 1900.

This only goes to show how easy it is to create an eggcorn. The original form is indeed soup up. Arnold Zwicky supplied the following references:

AHD4 and NOAD2 both have only “soup up”, AHD without further comment, NOAD suggesting that “super-” might have influenced the formation. OED2 has no entry for “supe” v., but does have “soup up” v. from 1931 (in “souped up”), which it suggests might have been influenced by “super-”, but otherwise derives from the following sense of “soup” n.:

1911 Webster’s Dict., Soup, any material injected into a horse with a view to changing its speed or temperament.

NSOED and Merriam-Webster Online also cite soup up only.

Get one’s just desserts has been suggested as a potential eggcorn a number of times. It is not an unproblematic reshaping, however: inadvertent double/single consonant misspellings are extremely common, as this web search shows. I have therefore collected examples that include further circumstantial evidence that the author thought of dessert as something edible. This is why the occurrences employ the verb eat instead of get. As always, it is necessary to weed out intentional puns.

When the context is that of a meal, but the word spelled desert (correctly for the idiom, but an error if the target is dessert), we have either an inadvertent slip or a writer who remembers their spelling lessons for getting one’s just deserts. The eggcorn then becomes effectively a hidden one.