Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Google hits on June 14, 2008:
15,500 “Dry sense of humor”
10,900 “Wry sense of humor”
I’ve heard both. Perhaps both are correct. Perhaps one is an eggcorn of the other.
Does anyone want to give a shot at it? My heart’s not in it today.
Last edited by jorkel (2008-06-14 08:46:25)
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Well,a quickish answer would seem to be that “dry humor” has been around a lot longer than “wry humor.” The OED shows uses of “dry” with jests, etc. going back to the 16th century. The first citation they give that links “dry” and “humor” is from 1864. But they might not have been concerned to show the earliest example of that coupling. They first cite “wry sense of humour” from 1928.
But I doubt one of the phrases is really an eggcorn of the other, even if there’s been mutual influence. If you look at all the entries for “dry” and “wry,” you start getting the feeling that certain senses of both words have been developing in parallel for a long time. “Dry” could mean something like”unemotional” or “ironic” or “caustic” in the 16th C, and the “oblique” and “unfair” meanings of “wry” in reference to persons and their statements start about the same time. “Unfair humor” and “caustic humor” don’t seem so different; and “oblique humor” and “ostensibly emotionless humor” also have a lot of overlap. I think it’s really a case of convergent linguistic evolution.
And then there’s “sly humor”....
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