Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
On system or website “login” forms there is often a “secret question” that must be answered in order to retreive a forgotten password. Usually the question is something like “What was the name of your first pet?” or “What is your mother’s maiden name?”
While working in an IT department I have started to see this usage:
“What is your favorite past time?”
I have been tempted to answer “Hmm, well I’ve always been partial to the Victorian Era…” or “Puberty was actually pretty good to me…”
When I confronted the Business Analyst who set up these forms with this confusion she had no idea what I was talking about. I think that she thought that her usage made sense.
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Welcome to the Forum, SledDawg.
This is certainly a reshaping and novel usage. In order to be considered an eggcorn, it should also have a semantic component such that the novel usage makes as much or more sense as the original.
Certainly there is an affinity between past and time – we call one of the major divisions of time “the past,” for instance. If the user thinks of a pastime as something that causes (present) time to become past, there may be the necessary semantic component to call this an eggcorn. (And, I suppose “become past” is a fair synonym of “pass” as in the original passe-temps, pass-time.)
I suspect, though, that more than semantics, orthography causes this reshaping. The original pastime includes the string <past>, which would seem to relate more to the noun past than to the verb pass. If someone vaguely remembers the spelling of pastime, it would be a small step to re-shape the form as past time.
Personally, I can never remember whether the past participle of pass is <passed> or <past>. I therefore have every sympathy for those who misspell related words.
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