Eggcorn Forum

A quiz for the eggcorn experts out there:

On a slide from a PowerPoint presentation on Mesopotamian civilization by an anthropologist/ethnologist we find the text below. It contains an error. See if you can spot it.

As commerce increased, civil law served to regulate transactions. Criminal law was instituted. Lex talonis—eye for an eye—became one of the cornerstones.

Scroll down for answer. No fair peeking!

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Did you catch it? The professor has not spelled the Latin phrase lex talionis correctly. The first “i” is missing.
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Lex talionis, a Roman legal principle, is based on talio, the Latin word for “retaliation.” Talio derives in turn from the Latin adjective talis, which means “of such kind” (cf. the French particle tel ). English “retaliation,” we note, is not only the meaning of the Latin talio: it is also derived from the ancient word. If you wonder whether there is a middle “i” in lex talionis,, think about the word “retal-i-ate.”

The misspelling “lex talonis” occurs hundreds of times on the web. It may be a semantically motivated malapropism, an eggcorn, with users seeing the word “talon” in the phrase. Perhaps their subconscious musings start with the “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” principle encapsulated by the Latin phrase, then leap from this moral concept to thoughts of the balance of nature and Tennyson’s poetical picture of nature “red in tooth and claw.” Or perhaps they are thinking that a bird wielding its talons invites retribution from another taloned creature.

This is one of the rare cases where we can do more than just guess about Mrs. Malaprop’s brain state. We can watch her neurons fire. Several users of the phrase “lex talonis” openly confess to seeing the word “talon” in the second word. Take, for example, this passage from a Sunday sermon by a Baptist minister :

The people of Israel received a law code first in Exodus 21, beginning at Verse 23: ‘But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise….’ This longstanding law has the Latin name Lex Talonis, which means ‘Law of the Talon.’”

“Nine-tenths of the population,” says W. H. Auden, “use twice as many words as they understand.” If Auden is right, the average grade on this quiz should be 45%.. The scores of certain Baptists may be lower.