Eggcorn Forum

freeman, Thank you and welcome to the Forum. Please don’t take offense, for I’m in a strange metaphorically stinking mood today.

At first whiff, ‘chaise lounge’ does give off a mild scent of eggcorn potential. Having underdeveloped olfactory receptor nerves for eggcorns myself, I checked both cavernous nostrils of the big English nose in the sky; the “Merriam-Webtser” and the “Oxford English Dictionary.” Both the MW and the OED nostrils smell ‘chaise lounge’ as an early twentieth century variant of the original French ‘chaise longue’. I then called out the google English bloodhounds who dutifully sniffed out 2,440,000 ghits, which is way too odiferous for an eggcorn candidate, unfortunately. [Afterthought: Good eggcorns tend to have a more pleasant aroma, say in the range; {50 < ghits < 500}, but not always. The highly pungent candidates have been long roasting in the wild linguistic oven thereby diffusing into common usage. The candidates in the vaguely fragrant range {ghits < 50} are probably mere slips or typos, but not necessarily.]

BTW, One of the above ghits on a dating site, of all places (http://ask.metafilter.com/49197/Id-like … ers-please) contained a rare and rather clever usage of ‘chaise’:
”
In the end, any dates that come of such meetings will be up to you and the other person—a cafe? a movie? dinner? a walk? or cut to the chaise? posted by pracowity at 1:53 AM on October 23, 2006
”
Now to me, that usage is funny by any ‘stench’ of the imagination.

Last edited by rogerthat (2008-06-21 11:16:14)

“Chaise lounge” actually has a Database entry here: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/194/chaise-lounge/

The entry marks the phrase as cross-language, but it really should note in addition that this is now a folk etymology—an eggcorn that’s all grown up and accepted as standard in certain areas. Historically it was an eggcorn, but I’d agree with rogerthat’s opinion that the term has outgrown the eggcorn label.

While I was checking the MWDEU entry just now, I was surprised to see that the volume draws a distinction between “chaise lounge” and “chaise longue” in American. It claims that the latter term is more typically used for outdoor furniture, and that the former is more typically used for indoor furniture. Huh—never heard that before, but then again I don’t own any furniture.

[Edit: Ken posted the comment above while I was looking things up in the MWDEU—I didn’t ignore him.]

Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-06-20 20:42:07)

A fully successful eggcorn is like a fully successful virus: it destroys itself in some sense.

But it only destroys itself by becoming so standard that the eggcornistas reject it. The polloi (or the hoi polloi, whichever you prefer) keep on blithely using it.

An surprising amount of standard speech has arisen by the popularization of some sort of “mistake”. Once it’s standard, it’s only grumps like us who still see it as a mistake.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-06-21 11:55:32)

Everyone’s speaking abstractly here. When I was a kid on Long Island 50 years ago, I never heard anyone say anything other than “chaise lounge.” That was the ordinary, indeed the only, name for the cheap outdoor recliner with aluminum frame and nylon webbing to be found on the “patio,” or 6’ by 6’ slab of concrete outside the back door. To this day I have never heard anyone say “chaise longue,” probably because the very name was a bit of lower-middle-class spiffiness that has pretty well passed away, together with the object it described. If I met a true chaise longue indoors nowadays, I would call it a “daybed.”

Although “chaise lounge” is a silly name for a sun lounger, it’s not an eggcorn when used with that meaning. I only class the expression as an eggcorn (and object to its use) when it is used to refer to a chaise longue, which is a kind of sofa.