Eggcorn Forum

On the web are about a hundred unique pages with “across purposes” in contexts where we would expect “at cross purposes.” Here’s a typical one:

Entry in BBC Guide: “I have noticed people spend hours talking across purposes about a word with different meanings to different disciplines” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A5138453)

Before querying the eggcorn potential for “across purposes,” we should ponder the acorn, “at cross purposes.” What are people thinking about when they use this idiom? For most people, I suspect, being “at cross purposes” with someone is imaged as having motivations or agendas that “cross” those of the other person because motives and plans of the two parties do not run parallel to each other. At least that’s the image that pops into my mind when I say the phrase.

This modern version of the story behind “at cross purposes” is a perversion. The idiom originally drew on senses of “cross” and “purpose” that have largely faded from modern English. To be cross to something meant to be opposed, contrary. “My beliefs on this subject are cross to those of the masses.” A “purpose” was a formal proposition, a question posed as a test. In the Faerie Queen, when Paridell presses his licentious suit on fair Hellenore, Spencer writes that “Oft purposes, oft riddles he deuysd,/ And thousands like, which flowed in his braine,/ With which he fed her fancie, and entysd./ To take to his new loue, and leaue her old despy.” To have “cross purposes” with someone in the seventeenth century, then, was to engage in a battle of wits by posing contrary questions on a topic.

There’s more to the story, however, than a pair of antique meanings. The specific path from these older senses of “cross” and “purpose” to the modern idiom may lie through the parlor. Specifically, through a parlor game. In the year of the Great Fire of London, Pepys noted in his diary, “Then to cross purposes, mighty merry; and then to bed.” The game of “cross-purposes” that was played by the Pepys crowd employed two or more teams working with sets of questions and answers on different subjects. I haven’t been able to ferret out the exact rules of this popular (it was standard parlor fare until the nineteenth century) game, but it appears to have involved an exchange of either the questions or the answers with other teams. The merry confusion that resulted from the conflation of mismatiched questions and answers became a paradigm for situations in which people mutually misinterpret the words or actions of others. To be “at” cross purposes with someone was to be “at something that resembled a game of” cross purposes.

For the modern speaker the game has dropped out of the picture. Those who use the phrase “at cross purposes,” if they image it the way I do, are probably participating in a hidden eggcorn.

Now for the mistaken idiom, “across purposes.” What might the person be thinking who says “talking across purposes?” My guess would be that the parties in the confusion are pictured at the opposite edges of a dividing chasm. The chasm holds the true state of affairs, and the people on either side are talking to each other “across” the true purpose. If this is the image, then we have a nonhidden eggcorn behind the replacement of “at cross” with “across.”

Think of it as a eggcorn-shaped matryoshka doll concealing a hidden matryoskha doll inside. Makes you wonder what eggcorns might be inside the hidden doll.

Last edited by kem (2008-08-05 16:52:48)