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Chris -- 2018-04-11
An acquaintance says “hay barrel” for “hay bale,” so I decided to see whether he had any company. Yup, 400 raw hits. Barrels and bales are both containers in a certain way, and some bales are cylindrical – almost barrel-like in shape. But most of the “hay barrels” you can find photos of on the Web are of the traditional, rectangular variety. Most of the hits come from photography sites, so you can confirm immediately that the writers really are talking about bales of hay. Examples:
Valeska on a hay barrel.
http://www.drewandvaleska.com/gallery/v … 0.jpg.html
[drew’s photo of valeska]
Drew looks cute at the bottom of a hay barrel
http://www.drewandvaleska.com/gallery/v … 9.jpg.html
[valeska’s photo of drew]
Lambert and I tipping over some hay barrel thing. Yes, its a barrel of Hay on our balcony!
bq. http://www.webshots.com/search?query=wi … els+of+hay
[many photos of “hay barrels”]
Photo about Three kittens on a hay barrel.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2 … gle+Search
[photo here: http://www.picable.com/Nature/Cats/Thre … rrel.6842]
[Note that the Google search cue here calls this a “photo about three kittens.” “About”? Interesting preposition choice – but a quick googling shows that this writer is hardly alone.]
There are some nice photos of cylindrical hay bales here, but the photographer calls them “bales”:
http://naturewoman.wordpress.com/2007/0 … -the-spot/
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I wonder whether these people literally mean “barrel.” Some people say “warsh” for “wash” and “Cuber” for “Cuba.” If their community tends to pronounce “bale” like “barrel,” they may not know the proper term. Just a thought.
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You’ve got a good point, jorkel. I ask myself the same question when looking at some eggcorns. But, there’s another aspect as well: even if it is as postulated, at some point wouldn’t an innocent interaction with someone from outside this group engender a more “pure” eggcorn? That is, let’s say the utterer visits or relocates far from his local area and a child overhears a conversation including the word. If he in turn applies it to his own vocabulary, wouldn’t it now be a more legitimate eggcorn?
My personal experience with this is “crawdead” for crawdad/crawfish/crayfish. Surely, someone originally created the “crawdead” variant by just the means you describe, but as a child growing up in Texas I was unaware of anything other than that it sounded like “dead” to me. Despite all other various efforts on the part of texans to destroy the english lanuage, pronouncing “dad” as “dead” was not one of them. Nevertheless, crawdad was thus pronounced by my myself and my playmates. I never knew what the hell “dead” had to do with the things, but that is left to the “crayfish” post. Point is, I believe this sort of thing is involved in several eggcorns and perhaps, jorkel, you could expound upon it further and give the phenomenon a label.
Yay, done with part.
I like this eggcorn, hay barrel. It reminds me of wheelbarrow/wheelbarrel. Has that one been done yet? I think the imagery is similar: a barrel on wheels.
Yes, “wheel barrel” has made it. I’m glad. Thanks.
Last edited by booboo (2007-07-21 00:40:43)
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Yeah, this one is something of a headscratcher. It’d be nice if the people taking pictures of “hay barrels” were showing us round things and the people taking pictures of “hay bales” were showing us only rectangular things; that would make my attempt at an explanation much more convincing. But I’m not sure that this could be explained by dialect since the bale>>barrel transformation doesn’t seem typical of any US dialect I know. But this left-coaster may be wrong—has anyone heard a regular conflation of, say, pale/peril, shale/Cheryl, kale/carol?
I think Booboo’s “meme” explanation may be the only way of making sense of it—someone started replacing the less-common “bale” with the more-common “barrel,” and someone else (for whatever reason) picked it up. Dunno.
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Pat’s got the right word for booboo’s explanation: meme. A “meme” is effectively a concept virus; Someone gets a catchy idea, and everyone else spreads it around either knowingly or unknowingly.
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“Hay barrel” was one of the first thing I searched for after I found out about eegcorns and this website. My little sister used this term when we were kids. My older sis and I were quick to make fun of it. It did make a certain sense in the context of the dialect of our rural Oklahoma. I’ve yet to think of another example of this transformation, such the kale/Carol posited above, but here’s a couple observations. First, my sister was definitely under the impression that they were “barrels” of hay, like whiskey barrels. The local dialect also has a lot of ambiguity in “r” uses as attested to in wash=warsh and the barbwire>>bobwire eggcorn. Also, in the southern_draw we used, bale is often pronounced as bay-el, which can help explain the ease of a jump to barrel. So while kale isn’t Carol, Karl is said the same as Carol.
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