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#1 2008-07-19 17:18:05

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

fail by the wayside << fall by the wayside

There are a few examples on the web of what appears to be a perversion of a Biblical metaphor. In the parable of the seeds some of the seeds “fall by the wayside” and birds come and eat the seeds. The parable and its explanation can be found in all three synoptic gospels (e.g., Mark 4). English has adopted the New Testament expression as a general idiom: “to fall by the wayside” means to fail to complete an activity. Nearly a thousand ughits.

Several web scribes have eggcorned this to “fail by the wayside,” which captures the fundamental meaning of the idiom but loses the colorful background of the sower story. Vide:

New York Times theater article: “In these circumstances it is inevitable that some plays must fail by the wayside” (http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:5f … =firefox-a)

Quotation in business article: “Investment priorities may or may not fail by the wayside during the first couple of years” (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m … 55283/pg_2)

Posted response to op-ed article: “The non-worthwhile groups; i.e., those who cannot generate a compelling incentive for people to part with their well-earned money, will fail by the wayside, as they should. ” (http://uspolitics.newsvine.com/_news/20 … tax-exempt)


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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#2 2008-07-19 18:32:56

patschwieterman
Administrator
From: California
Registered: 2005-10-25
Posts: 1680

Re: fail by the wayside << fall by the wayside

An excellent find—one of my favorites recently. It’s a bit surprising, too, since “fall by the wayside” looks fairly transparent even if you don’t know the Parable of the Sower. As a kid I must have been quite familiar with the parable, but I had a different way of explaining this idiom: I imagined a great road, filled with travelers, stretching into the distance—and the people lacking stamina or business sense or moral rectitude or whatever fell by the side of the road and got no further.

Once I saw your post, I predicted to myself that “failed by the wayside” would have a smaller relative market share than “fell by the wayside.” And sure enough, here are the numbers I ran:

Fall by the wayside 471k raw hits
Fell by the wayside 145k raw hits

Fail by the wayside 24 raw hits / 13 u
Failed by the wayside 1 raw hit / 1 u

“Fall” beats “fell” by a 3:1 margin but “fail” beats “failed” by a 13:1 (or arguably 24:1) margin. Obviously, the numbers for the “fail” reshaping are so tiny that you wouldn’t want to make too much of the fail/failed ratio. But they make sense to me, and suggest that a sense of the standard idiom is often lurking somewhere in people’s brains. “Fail by the wayside” is close enough in sound to the original that it sets off fewer alarms. But I think that once people try to stick the participial ending on “fail,” it starts sounding odder than “fail” by itself does—cluing them in to the fact that they may have reshaped the standard idiom.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-07-19 18:35:55)

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#3 2008-07-19 19:17:23

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

Re: fail by the wayside << fall by the wayside

Permuting the tense is a good trick. Have to remember that one.


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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