Eggcorn Forum

I’m not sure why you didn’t get any hits—I got 5 on a search I just ran. The main one is the Database article here: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/340/chord/

The article calls this one “questionable” because some authorities argue that “vocal chords” is a legitimate spelling.

Oh, sorry—I see what the problem is now. You must have entered “vocal chords” in the search bubble at the top of this page. But that will just return any hits in the various “forums” here on the website—“Contribute,” “Eggcornology,” etc. The problem is that the earlier comments on “vocal chords” were all connected to the Database in some way, and the search button at the top of the forum pages doesn’t search the Database.

If you want to search the whole site, the best bet is to punch the “Eggcorn Database” button at the top of this page. That’ll bring up the site homepage, and at that point look to the column on the right. There’ll be two “search” buttons. The second one—“Google Search”—is the really useful one. Entering “vocal chords” there should return six hits.

Admittedly, all our search buttons have their problems, but “Google Search” is the one I always go to.

Judging from entries in the OED, the cord/chord thing is a fairly tangled skein.

“Cord” in the sense of a string or rope is first attested in English in the very early 14th century; it comes from French “corde,” which is in its turn derived from Latin “chorda,” which means string. It’s apparently a Greek borrowing in Latin and therefore has that Greek-looking “ch-” at the beginning.

“Chord” in the sense of the musical term first comes into English in the late 15th century – also in the spelling “cord”; it comes from Old French “acord” and is therefore unrelated etymologically to (the modern word) “cord.”

So part of the problem here is that both words were typically just plain “cord” in their earliest uses in English.

In the 16th century, a classicizing impulse in English spelling altered the orthography of lots of words –- and “cord” (as in string) is among them. Because the Latin word had a “ch-,” that spelling was also adopted in English.

For better or worse, this spelling change began to be applied to the musical term “chord” as well at the very end of the sixteenth century. The OED credits plain old “confusion” for the change, though regulars on this forum will probably consider it an eggcorn-induced confusion.

In the 19th century the names of certain anatomical parts started to become fixed, and phrases referring to rope-like structures like “umbilical c(h)ord,” “spinal c(h)ord,” and “vocal c(h)ord” entered general circulation. The earliest citations for these particular phrases seem to use the “chord” spelling, though “cord” was also used by 18th and 19th century anatomists to refer to body parts. Here, for instance, is the earliest citation I found for “vocal chord” –- it’s from Thomas Henry Huxley’s Lessons in Elementary Physiology (1866):

According as the vocal chords are relaxed or tightened.

Huxley could arguably have chosen either option, but 19th century scientists generally had a good grounding in Latin, and I suspect he felt the Latinate spelling looked more “scientific.”

By the 20th century, the “chord” spelling for rope- or string-like things was becoming less popular, esp. in the US, where it’s now often considered a misspelling. But that’s not necessarily the case everywhere. Consider the entry for (rope-like) “chord” from the OED:

Applied to various structures; esp. the vocal chords, spermatic chord, spinal chord, and umbilical chord (see VOCAL, etc.). The last-named is now commonly cord, the second and third often so.

That’s from the second edition, published in 1989. They still seem to consider “spermatic chord” and “spinal chord” perfectly reasonable alternatives, though they indicate that “umbilical cord” is now the standard. The striking thing here is that the OED editors’ final sentence doesn’t even mention “vocal chord.” Do they mean to imply thereby that “vocal chord” is still the standard? They do cite “vocal cord” under the entry for “cord,” but they don’t even bother to give a citation for the phrase there—a fairly unusual omission for them.

So if you’ve followed the thread this far, here—finally—is the weird payoff. In the US at least, we now typically spell the word that comes from Latin “chorda” as “cord.” And we spell the musical term –- which originally had nothing to do with Latin “chorda” –- as “chord.” In other words, the two words have switched places orthographically! This would be a good example to bring up the next time someone tells you that spelling should reflect etymology or “the original form” of a word.

I don’t deny that there’s an eggcornish element to all this, but there’s so much ambiguity in this story that it’s really difficult to look at a given spelling of cord/chord and say whether or not it’s an example of an eggcorn if you don’t have any more context. A person using “vocal chords” may be a poor speller—or they may have carefully consulted the OED. And “vocal chords” appears, after all, to be the original spelling. If contemporary users of English are confused, well, they’ve got a really good right to be.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2007-09-15 23:20:34)