Eggcorn Forum

I suspect that “wind/winds of change” is much older than “wings of change.” A search of Project Gutenberg texts shows the windy version in two texts from the first half of the 1800s. The phrase also shows up in a poem by Swinburne (“Tiresias”) and in one of Carl Van Doren’s litcrit works from the 1920s. “Wings of change,” in contrast, is not in the Gutenberg e-texts.

On this side of the pond “winds of change” has other associations. I connect it with the heady 60s. Kennedy, for example, used it in his third inaugural address. In recent months the phrase has been getting a heavy workout from the followers of Barack Obama. Let the reader understand.

Last edited by kem (2008-03-31 13:28:40)

It also occurs to me that the ng>>nd reshaping is something we’ve seen a few times, in pairs like wingnut>>windnut, hangglider>>handglider and hangnail>>handnail. I’m pretty sure that more examples have surfaced on the forum (there must be some nd>>ng reshapings out there somewhere), but those are all I can think of at the moment.

“Wings of change” is probably not a typo in the Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley poem. I did a quick search on some of her online poetry and found seven other change metaphors in her poetry:

breath of change
clouds of change
Fortune’s freaks of change
world of change
word of change
hues of change
shrouds of change

If Lady Emmeline wasn’t a politician, she must have been the daughter of one.

We have chased both “winds of change” and “wings of change” back to the early 1800s. I’m beginning to wonder if there is any point in this exercise. Both phrases are readily coined, and could occur in any language at any time. If we found one of them in Chaucer, would it prove anything?

I certainly agree that neither “winds of change” nor “wings of change” is an eggcorn. For me, an eggcorn has to have an element of wrongness or oddity about it to qualify – it should still feel like a “mistake.” Both of these phrases, by contrast, make sense in themselves and are often used in contexts where the images of winds or wings are built on rhetorically.

That element of wrongness that I see as being an essential part of the definition of an eggcorn has always made me feel a little uncomfortable with the phrase “stealth eggcorns,” which we occasionally use around here to refer to pairings similar to “winds/wings of change.” It’s a catchy phrase, but some of the things we’ve applied it to don’t seem like eggcorns to me, even if they may have arisen through an eggcornish kind of logic. I’m also a bit disappointed that Chris recently took down the box on the Database homepage that described eggcorns as “mistakes” or “errors” (I forget which word she used) – I always felt that the point was an important one worth highlighting.

Getting back to the comments by Kem and Nilep, I’m not convinced that looking at the dates at which similar phrases arose is a pointless exercise. One of my favorite Language Log posts on eggcorns is one by Mark Liberman, in which he looks at the phrases “hone in on” and “home in on” with an eye toward discovering which came first. (The post is here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 00378.html) After reviewing the data, Liberman writes, “So while I agree that home in on was almost certainly the original pattern, hone in on apparently followed it almost instantly.” Once the phrase “home in on” developed during or shortly after WWII, the eggcornish “hone in on” came into existence soon after. This is a point both Liberman and another Language Log contributor, Ben Zimmer, have returned to a few times since: once a new phrase gains currency, it’s likely to be eggcorned very quickly if the potential for that exists. This seems to be a fairly predictable phenomenon.

I don’t see why the same eggcornish process can’t be at work in the production of non-eggcorns. If “winds of change” really did arise (or at least start spreading) in the early 19th century – and so far we haven’t found any evidence of earlier uses despite trips to some fairly inclusive databases – why couldn’t the existence of that phrase have suggested the possibility of “wings of change,” a phonologically very similar combination with similar connotations? We have the same elements here that regularly lead to the production of eggcorns: the phrases are so similar orthographically and phonologically that there’s only a difference of one letter; we know that “nd” and “ng” are sounds that substitute for each other in eggcorns; and there’s definitely semantic overlap between the two phrases. Given the existence of a phrase “winds of change,” it’d actually be a little strange if “wings of change” didn’t come into existence, too.

So far, the earliest citation I’ve found for “wings of change” is 1825, and the earliest for “wings of change” is 1838 (though the latter could be earlier depending on when the poem “A Smile” was first composed). Kem’s right – the similarity in dates doesn’t prove a relation between the two phrases; I’m not sure “proof” would be possible (I can’t imagine what form it would take). But it’s certainly interestingly suggestive.

As for the idea that ”[b]oth phrases are readily coined, and could occur in any language at any time,” I don’t think I agree if I understand what’s meant here. I don’t think it’s very easy for us to tell what kinds of phrases could be readily coined or widely disseminated at a given point in a language’s history. Once we’re familiar with a phrase, that familiarity lends it a sense of naturalness or even inevitability. But that may be a retrospective illusion; we can’t be sure the phrase would have felt that way to a speaker of an earlier age.

I can actually give a concrete example in this regard. In the 90s, I lived overseas in a non-Anglophone country for about a year and a half, and I returned to the US right during the height of the dot.com madness. Given the fact that I’d been away a relatively brief time, I was really surprised to hear phrases that seemed new and odd to me. One that was turning up on radio commercials all the time was advice on “growing your business.” I’d never heard that particular idiom before. “Making your business grow” seemed normal, but “growing your business” sounded a bit grotesque to my ears. It was nevertheless suddenly everywhere. Today, however, I can only remember that feeling of wrongness. The phrase is now so familiar that it seems acceptable to me as well.

“Growing your business” seems like it too could be “readily coined” in any period of the language that was familiar with the modern sense of “business.” It’s actually just a fairly predictable extension of the use of “grow” found in “growing corn” or “growing a garden.”

But my sense that “growing your business” was fairly new in the late 1990s can be confirmed with a books.google.com search. Today, you get over 600 hits. But if you narrow the search to results before 1980, you get only only 7 periodical hits – and periodical hits are almost always untrustworthy on books.google.com. This phrase appears to have arisen during the 1980s (my earliest firm hits so far are from the late 1980s), and only became generally current during the dotcom period. No one seems to have been using it in 1950 or 1850 or 1750. Sure, an 18th C speaker probably would have understood what the phrase meant, but s/he would probably also have found it bizarre. And I’m not convinced that there’s something “natural” or inevitable about this phrase simply because its meaning seems transparent once you run across it or because the basic metaphor is a familiar one. I don’t know why it took the language 1500 years to decide that “growing your business” was okay, but it doesn’t really make much sense to me to say that the phrase could have arisen earlier. Only a certain nexus of hard to define social and linguistic forces made it possible for that particular idiom to spread and to seem so natural now.