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Chris -- 2018-04-11
A certain irony attended my first encounter with this unlikely-looking substitution. I was reading the book Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean by Michael Erard (2008), about which Kem posted a brief note some time ago. On page 38, Erard explains how two Viennese professors published a book on speech errors and their analysis a few years before another resident of Vienna achieved far greater fame for work on the same topic:
Meringer and Mayer published them in a book titled Misspeaking and Misreading (or Versprechen und Verlesen) in 1895, six years before the first appearance of “Psychopathology†as an article in 1901, and long before Freud’s stature as a cornerstore ol twentieth-century intellectual culture became a reality.
http://books.google.com/books?id=smRYSk … t&resnum=1
[Portions of the citation have been retyped from Boosa.google.com, um, I mean Books.google.com]
Freud is a cornerstore of twentieth-century intellectual culture? What’s going on here? We’re talking about a book on verbal blunders, so you’d expect it to be fairly well proofread. And while there are a few instances where Erard humorously incorporates into his own prose some of the types of blunders he’s discussing at the moment, this one doesn’t seem to fit the pattern of his illustrative “errors.â€
It also doesn’t seem like a “Cupertino†– a spellchecker-induced typo – because most people use different hands in typing r and n; I couldn’t get my spellchecker program to offer “cornerstore†as a possibility for any of my intentional misspellings.
Erard himself may offer a better explanation. Just a bit later in the book (p. 41), he discusses the phenomenon of “perseveration,†in which a speaker repeats a sound that appeared earlier in a word or phrase. In this case, “or†from the first syllable of the word “cornerstore†may have been carried over to the third. Of course, that still wouldn’t explain how an editor missed this. Perhaps the similarity in shape between r and n has something to do with it.
However “cornerstone>>cornerstore†got into Erard’s text, the substitution is surprisingly common in edited prose, and it appears in some high-profile places. My first three citations below are, respectively, from a book by the well-known historian W. Bruce Lincoln, from USA Today, and from the November, 1966 issue of The Atlantic. Google lists 201 ughits for the string “the cornerstore of,†but that number doesn’t account for most of the 57 ughits on Books.google.com. (In a few cases, the writer meant a literal “cornerstone,†but very few of my hits referred to a literal “cornerstore.â€) And if you consider that there must be other examples of the substitution beyond that particular string, the numbers start to become a bit surprising.
Examples:
Far from being a survival of some earlier historical period, the idea of the family as sacred and inviolate, the cornerstore of society and the seat of virtue, is a characteristically modern idea bound up with the “privatization” of experience and with the tendency of the middle class, in Aries’s words, “to organize itself separately, in a homogeneous environment, among its families, in homes designed for privacy, in new districts kept free from all lower-class contamination.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/196611/divorce/4
[From the November, 1966 issue of the The Atlantic. Perhaps a scanning error could have led to the problem in this case?]
[...]Nikoskaia Mill, the cornerstore of their great fortune.
http://books.google.com/books?id=NIwTvN … r=0&pgis=1
[From page 78 of In War’s Dark Shadow: the Russians before the Great War by W. Bruce Lincoln – partially retyped from Books.google.com]
The ability to analyze the population and determine the likelihood of certain events is the cornerstore of the insurance industry.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/col … tion_N.htm
As beautiful as it is informative, “Symbols of Japan” is destined to be the cornerstore of every art and design library.
http://www.vromansbookstore.com/book/9780847823611
The FODI system is the cornerstore of optic recycling at the National Ignition Facility
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/s … 59187.html
Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-06-21 20:05:06)
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I read Erard and missed that slip (my eyes aren’t good at picking up typos, especially my own).
Seems to me like it might be an eggcorn. Since it is a holus-bolus substitution (i.e., the word is not broken down into parts), I’d be inclined to call it a flounder eggcorn.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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i think there’s a simpler explanation: at some point in the production process, the “n” becomes an “r” and then never got caught because of the visual similarity of the two letters.
the proof: when I search my computer for all files with “cornerstore,” the first one that comes up is the February 2007 galley—not any of the zillions of drafts that I did preceding that. It shows up again on a second pass galley in August of 2007, then again in the galleys for the paperback. “cornerstone” comes up multiple times in multiple drafts.
i suppose it’s possible that a copyeditor turned “cornerstone” into “cornerstore” as of the February 2007 galley—but why? how? that wouldn’t make it the same sort of production slip as most of the errors I talk about in the book.
in any case, it’s embarrassing. but i’m glad it got the slip juice flowing.
the funny thing is, early on i discussed with my editor the idea of inserting a set number of deliberate errors into the text, then holding a contest to see if people could find them all, a la joseph williams. the idea was nixed—though perhaps putting errors in would keep the error gremlins (such as the ones that produced the aforementioned goof) from having their way.
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Thanks for stopping by and for taking the time to check your files. First-hand testimony is the ideal around here, but of course we don’t usually get it. I like this slip a lot, and in a way I’m glad its source remains a bit mysterious.
Thanks, too, for Um. And I’m sure I’m not the only one here eagerly anticipating Babel No More, though I know it’s a ways off yet.
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Have you considered demonic possession? A mysterious typo turned up in a recent book of mine. Cheap data storage has made it possible to keep multiple searchable drafts of works, so I did what you did, Michael-I started tunneling back in time to find a draft in which the typo did not exist. I located the typo in the transition between the second and third galleys in a file that was in the control of the publisher and on a page that was not subject to edits. Ergo, some demon on the publisher’s computer did it.
Mind you, I’m not completely committed to the possession theory. I can think of two other explanations. It could be the CIA. Or it could be that quantum effects have decided to migrate from the subatomic realm.
That said, I find cornerstone >> cornerstore a little too subtle for a demon. Looks more like misguided human intervention.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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