Eggcorn Forum

“Duck tape” has been submitted to the forum many times, and quite a number of professional wordanistas have also discussed the origins of “duct tape/duck tape” – including William F. Safire, Jan Freeman, Michael Quinions and various linguists and others on the American Dialect Society discussion list. The problem is that it’s not clear that “duck tape” is an eggcorn. In fact, little about the name(s) of this stuff is clear.

The material now usually called “duct tape” was created by a division of Johnson and Johnson in 1942 for the war effort. Bizarrely, no one is sure what it was called at the time. Johnson and Johnson itself claims that soldiers called the material “duck tape” because it’s more or less waterproof, but they don’t have contemporary documentation to support this story. There are citations from the early 1940s onwards for “duck tape,” but most of the examples available before the 1970s seem to be referring to thin strips of cotton duck – not the triple-layer adhesive. That leads professional wordanistas like Jan Freeman and Michael Quinions to suspect that the Johnson and Johnson story is a folk etymology. But “duct tape” itself isn’t firmly documented until the mid 1960s, and there’s no evidence at all that the material was originally developed to be used on heating ducts; it appears to have been used as an all-purpose adhesive right from the get-go. So the situation’s a bit astonishing: there must still be tens of millions of people alive today who handled this stuff in the 20 year period between its first introduction and the first firm citations for “duct tape,” but no one has yet produced unshakable evidence for its name at that time. One more reminder of how little we know about our own language.

Personally, I’m less skeptical about “duck tape” than Freeman and Quinions. One of the things I’ve learned from a couple of years of hanging out here at the Eggcorns Forum is that if a phrase can be eggcorned, it will be eggcorned – and pretty quickly, too. If “duck tape” was the original name – as its first manufacturer claims – then “duct tape” is actually the eggcorn, recorded earlier than the original name. But if “duct tape” was the original name, then the pre-existence of the phrase “duck tape” – in whatever application – would almost certainly have exerted a strong eggcornish pull on the original name – and probably right away. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that WWII soldiers were using both names. Eggcornish pairs often seem to be like fraternal twins: they don’t look exactly alike, but one is born soon after the other. Until someone comes up with more cold, hard textual evidence, I think trying to untangle this particular story through the application of “common sense” is a bit pointless.

If anyone cares to read more, there’s a lot more to read. For one of the longer exchanges about “duck tape” on this forum, go here:

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … p?pid=1289

For one of the best larger overviews of the whole thing, see Michael Quinions’ post on World Wide Words:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-duc4.htm

For one discussion over at the American Dialect Society (I think they may have come back to this a few times) that includes really useful excerpts from the Safire and Freeman columns, go here:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bi … D=0&P=6191

For a history of the name from the perspective of people who represent a duct tape manufacturer named Duck Tape, go here:

http://www.octanecreative.com/ducttape/duckvsduct.html

For a weirdly entertaining overview of duct tape, its history, and its important place in our culture, go here:

http://www.octanecreative.com/ducttape/DT101/index.html

Last edited by patschwieterman (2007-03-13 00:43:43)