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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
John Hancock, the President of the Second Continental Congress in 1776 and later Governor of Massachusetts, is best known today for his large, ornate signature on the U. S. Declaration of Independence. So well known, in fact, that “John Hancock†has become a slang term for “signature†(“Just put your John Hancock on the dotted line, sir.â€)
On hundreds, perhaps thousands, of web pages the misspelled “John Handcock†is used in a context that refers to a person’s a signature. Is there some semantic influence from “hand,†which can mean “writing style,†in this misspelling? My gut tells me that there is, but the evidence is weak-the spellings “John Handcock Tower†and “John Handcock Insurance†seem to occur at about the same rate as the misspelling “your/his John Handcock.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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There’s a natural phonological transition phenomenon at work here too, especially for those who try to pronounce the word carefully as Hancock and not Hangcock . It is the same sort of process that gives you sumpthing for something . It is hard to switch both the oral closure position and the velic aperture (letting air into the nose or keeping it out) at the same instant. If you cut off the velic passage first you transform the n into a d , which then gets changed to the k (orthographically c ), and you have your Handcock . If you close off the velic later you get Han-ng-cock , or simply Hangcock .
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(Writing about this tends to sound vaguely pornographic, what?)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-12-19 17:08:52)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Writing about this tends to sound vaguely pornographic, what?
To the pure, all things are pure.
Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa May Alcott of Little Women fame, changed the spelling of his
surname from Alcock to Alcott. For the obvious reason. And just in time. If the Alcocks had waited
another generation, his daughter’s fame would have permanently cemented the surname in the
American mind.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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kem wrote:
To the pure, all things are pure.
Touché.
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But it is one of the occupational hazards of this kind of pursuit: you tend to heighten your awareness of possible re-imagings of what you say. Eggcorns are closely related to the salacious jokes in which respected figures use words in a perfectly innocent way but one which lends itself to scurrilous interpretation.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-12-19 17:06:42)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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