Eggcorn Forum

Speaking of haplology, we recently hired a contractor to add a room to our home. We overheard construction workmen using jargon that we found to be slightly unusual. We’ve since had lots of fun casually adopting the contagious usage “stension” for “extension [chord]” and also “electric” for either “electricity” or “electrical outlet.” Do these dropped syllables constitute haplologies in the strictest sense?

Also, we overheard a plumber use a potential eggcorn; “crawler” for “crawl space.” For me, ‘crawler’ seems loaded with creepy connotations because we do have lots of spiders and other “creepy-crawlies” in the crawl space under our house.

I can imagine the composite scenario of a workman hollering; “There’s no ‘electric’ in this ‘crawler’. Throw me a ‘stension’ !” Is this a regional thing or do construction workmen have a national dialect convention?

I worked in music retail for many years, and I was impressed by the richness of specialized retail vocabulary—“upstock,” “understock,” “overstock,” “endcap,” “pull sheet,” “in-store,” “one-stop,” “ma ‘n pop,” and on and on.

And there were store-to-store differences. After years at one place, I transferred to a branch an hour north. At the first store, we used the whimsical term “foam puppies” for what my local UPS store calls “packing peanuts.” At the second store, we used the more standard “foam peanuts.” And there was at least one difference that reminds me of eggcorns: the CDs set aside for in-store play were called the “playstack” at one store but the “playstock” at the other one.

I imagine someone somewhere has studied professional jargon systematically. A lot of it isn’t in dictionaries. MW online has the widespread “endcap” listed, but the OED doesn’t.

[Edit: Right after I posted this, I heard a short program on the radio in which the speaker explained the idea of “8 row cherries.” These are cherries so large that you can only get 8 of them squeezed into one row of a standard cherry box. 10 row cherries are decidedly less impressive.]

Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-06-18 14:58:54)

Yeah, it’d be fun to have a cat and name it Fido. Or is that too old-fashioned a name to even be relevant?

DavidTuggy wrote:

Yeah, it’d be fun to have a cat and name it Fido. Or is that too old-fashioned a name to even be relevant?

I used to babysit for a kid who HAD a cat named Fido.

But do you know, I have never met a dog named Fido—or Rover.

But I think that stereotype still lingers.

I had an aunt who named her pet tortoise ‘Lips’. ( I never imagined there’d be an opportunity to share that with anyone else…)

My brother named his dog “Perita,” which apparently means “little dog” and got a kick out of introducing his pets: “our dog, Perita, which means ‘little dog,’ and the cat, Muffin, which means ‘small baked good.’”

The lengths word geeks will go to, to make a bad joke.

(and I have met another can named Mouse)

“Perita” (as opposed to “Perrita”) would mean “Little Pear.” I’ve had pear muffins, and they’re delicious.

This probably belongs in a different category, perhaps “Things you read and correctly pronounced in your mind but misunderstood.” Pat’s recent Contribute! post “Incandlescent” for “incandescent” jogged yet another childhood memory for me. When I first read the word incandescent (ca. 5th grade), I thought it to literally mean that the light bulb “doesn’t flicker like a candle.” This was based upon my naive analysis that the prefix ‘in’ implies ‘not’ as in incapable or inconsiderate; ‘cand’ is a fragment of candle; the suffix ‘escent’ implies “essence of”. Even though my aging copy of OED shows that the non-standard syllabic decomposition was slightly misleading, I can’t help but wonder whether lack of flicker was a among the primary considerations in Thomas Edison’s mind when he described his light bulb invention (non-inflammability notwithstanding). What would have happened if Nikola Tesla had experimented with ‘influorescent’ tubes?

Do speculative secondhand accounts count? I was told about about the FOAF who thought “entranced” (as in being in a trance) was stressed on the first syllable—it made sense to the FOAF, and they argued about it. (I think both people were teens at the time.) I don’t think I thought to ask about rationale, but I wonder whether the speaker might have been envisioning being “entered” by some power that takes you over. (Kinda like the “inspiration” sent by the muse.) But I’m guessing.

Usually “friend of a friend.” It’s really common in urban folklore circles, where the story about the vanishing hitchhiker ACTUALLY HAPPENED!!! to a “friend of a friend” we’ve all lost touch with.

Yes! I’ve lost touch with the friend who told me this, so all you urban folklorists are welcome to start adding me to the archives.

I had (college) students once write a paper about the usage of some common word that’s hard to define, and I got some amazing submissions. One girl wrote on the word “cute”, and brought out several things I would never have thought of (E.g. did you ever think that a good opposite of “cute” is “dangerous”? As I’ve checked around and thought about it, it fits amazingly well. She showed a pic of a doped grizzly bear being tagged, and it was indeed “cute”. But imagine it coming out from under the anaesthetic, and it would very quickly cease being cute!)

Anyhow (I’m coming eventually to the point), she concocted this cute little story about a cute little boy and girl who go hand-in-hand to their cute little kindergarten class, and see all the cute little stuffed animals around the room and the cute decorations painted around the wall, and they just go “Awwww …” when they see it, and “That sense of awe helps us understand what the word ‘cute’ means” !!!

I was blown away. But I’ve come across several since then that truly understand “awe” as the emotional reaction that makes you want to go “awwww”.

I had wondered what people meant when they sang (to a catchy little tune) “Our God is an awesome God”— maybe their God is a cute little tame thing that makes you want to go “Awww” and chuck him under the chin?

Anyhow, you could look at it as a pretty drastic hidden eggcorn. Awe is zero-derived from Awww. Awesome.

“Outlier”, pronounced [OUTlee-er] like “friendlier”, lasted past college for me, as I remember. It will always be associated in my mind with Won-tolla, in the Red Dog story in the Jungle Book. If they’d just spelled it outliar, I’d have known how to pronounce it. But I’d have been puzzled over its meaning, despite the following from jorkel:

“Outliers” are data points that fall outside an expected range. More generally, it can refer to anything that deviates significantly from the norm. I’m sure the term “outliar” is often an intentional reshaping meant to place an emphasis that anything that far astray must surely be a liar. I just wonder if any of the usages are eggcorns. Too bad there aren’t more. I just get a chuckle out of the imagery every time I think about it.

(It’s only statistical outliers that will so deviate from the norm as to seem untrue.)

Craig C Clarke wrote:

”...he pronounced his name “Morris,” and since all adults called him that it was some time before I realized that it was spelled Maurice. I’m not sure why he read the word Maurice as Morris, given that he grew up speaking French…”

I just learned a few years ago that Maurice is also an Irish name and, in contradistinction to the French pronunciation, the Irish traditionally pronounce it “Morris”. So, even though your grandpa grew up speaking French, perhaps there was an Irish influence in his pronunciation somehow?

Dixon

Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2008-08-06 02:36:12)