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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
The idiom “at a snail’s pace†is an English metaphor with deep roots. The OED notes a use of the phrase as early as the fifteenth century. The meaning of the idiom is, one would think, self-explanatory.
Why, then, do we find “at a snail’s space†on several dozen web pages? Three samples:
Yahoo tech forum post: “So in the race for computing we are moving at a snail’s space†(http://tinyurl.com/57qmq4)
Automobile review: “Steering, with speed-sensing power controlling a rack and pinion device, feels taut on the wheel at speed but easy to turn at a snail’s space or when parking.
†(http://www.autohopper.com/reviews/2001_ … REVIEW.asp)
Blog entry: “the basic speed at which an opera unfolds keeps the dramatic action moving at a snail’s space compared to the time parameters and artistic freedom enjoyed while crafting a cinematic moment.†(http://myculturallandscape.blogspot.com … thing.html)
Nothing recent about this mistake, by the way. Google Books lists over forty unique hits for “at a snail’s space†in print publications, and the dates of the books are all over the map. The earliest I found was 1823 (at http://books.google.com/books?id=gtcYAA … s+space%22).
Perhaps the word “pace†took a hit to its familiarity quotient at some point in the nineteenth or twentieth century and nimble minds leaped to the word “space.†There is, after all, no difference (or almost no difference) in the sound of the idiom with the word “space†in place of “pace.â€
The idiom’s imagery switches slightly with the substitution. “Pace†evokes the measure of speed (distance over time), “space†suggests the measure of simple distance. The traveler proceeding “at a snail’s space†fails to cover much ground.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I found a few ‘snail space’ variants too, mainly from sites where English would probably be a second language. A snail, when it’s at home, doesn’t have a lot of elbow-room, which may have led to an eggcornish interpretation of the original expression…
The use of a worm screw 9 as a means for driving the dogging element 8 means that the electrical drive ar- rangement will require only a snail space …
www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?wo=1991000405& IA=WO1991000405&DISPLAY=DESC – 28k – Cached
(c) the steps taken to arrest the snail space growth in research and development in India? A N S W E R. MINISTER OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AND MINISTER OF …
dst.gov.in/admin_finance/ls_9/un_sq476.htm – 45k – Cached
... environs close to the border with Casamance have raised concerns over the snail space of the purported de-mining exercise by the Gambia Armed Forces. ...
www.foroyaa.gm/modules/news/ index.php?storytopic=5&start=255 – 38k – Cached
Much of the blame for the snail-space implementation has been attributed to the high turnover of new permanent secretaries, the Grand Coalition for change …
toabaita-authority.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html – 312k – Cached
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Nice—I laughed aloud at this one. Cool and puzzling. I really like reanalyses of the “false splitting” type—we haven’t really turned up all that many of them.
A note on Google Books dates: Unfortunately, you can’t trust trust their dates, esp. when the citation comes from a periodical. Google tends to date all citations from journals based on the date of the publication’s founding (though sometimes the date seems to have no rhyme or reason at all). This means that if you do a date search for the word “radar,” you’ll get citations going back all the way to 1704—couched in a technical jargon that would have flummoxed the most cutting-edge early 18th C engineer. So only the dates for books are in any way trustworthy, and I’ve found that even those can sometimes be way, way off—the earlier the date, the more cautious you’ve got to be.
Also, Google’s scanners seem to have troubles reading older type fonts. On a couple of different occasions I’ve thought that I’d uncovered a great instance of an eggcorn in a 19th C book cited on Google—only to find that the hard copy from the college library had a perfectly standard form. If there are weirdly placed punctuation marks, odd sentence breaks, strange word splits, bizarrely malapropic usages, etc. in a 19th C Google Books citation, I’m usually pretty suspicious. I think that rushed application of a spellchecker program probably mediates some of this stuff.
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