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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Not sure about this one, but it seems to be the child of an eggcorn and a logical leap:
From a WaPost article this morning:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co … 01225.html
The president’s proposal to privatize Social Security was the brainchild of right-wing think tanks and the financial institutions that yearned to sell all those annuities. It never penciled out, and all sober analysis concluded that its chief effect would be to imperil retirement security itself.
Looks like it’s gone from panned out to penned out, and thence to penciled out.
25 hits on Google for never penciled out, 22 of which were used in this manner. Strangely, only 2 hits for never penned out, and only 2 uses of it in the misspelling sense in the first 20 of 633 for penned out.
What do you make of this?
Last edited by residentgeek (2006-11-15 15:55:59)
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I had never noticed this phrase before you pointed it out, but it gets tens of thousands of hits online.
After looking at more examples, I think this phrase is rather more specific than ”(not) to pan out.” This one, for the most part, is applied to financial considerations—something that doesn’t “pencil out” turns out not to be profitable or cost-effective once you’ve worked out the full financial picture. So while it’s possible that “pan out” is exerting a bit of influence here, I think the controlling metaphor is that out of sitting down and working out all the costs and profits with a pencil. Still, that doesn’t really explain the strangeness of that use of the prepostion “out.” Maybe “to work out”—as in “to work out all the variables,” etc.—has some influence here, too.
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patschwieterman wrote:
I think the controlling metaphor is that out of sitting down and working out all the costs and profits with a pencil. Still, that doesn’t really explain the strangeness of that use of the prepostion “out.” Maybe “to work out”—as in “to work out all the variables,” etc.—has some influence here, too.That calls to mind the notion of penciling something in, i.e., making a tentative agreement, subject to change or further review. Thanks for the feedback.
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After I responded to your post, it occurred to me that I was trying too hard to come up with a specific phrase that might have influenced the structure of your find. That “out” could very well be the “out” of phrases like “to tire someone out,” “to dry something out,” “to freak someone out” —it shows that an action has been done completely, exhaustively. If so, “to pencil something out” would be to have written out every possible financial variable concerning the profitability of a project.
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