Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
The Eggcorn Forum and the Eggcorn Database are currently in the process of being converted into static sites.
Once the conversion is complete, all existing posts are expected to still be accessible at their original URLs. However, no new posts will be possible.
Feel free to comment on the relevant forum threads.
Chris -- 2025-05-10
This weekend I heard a colleague say that someone’s action was poohbahed by another.
The person meant to say, I’m sure, that the object of scorn was pooh-poohed. The expression “pooh-pooh†is a reduplicative of “pooh,†which is onomatopoetical for the sound of derision made by puffing out the lips and letting the air out with a silent plosive. It is not, as some seem to think, borrowed from the child’s word for excrement–on the contrary, “poo†may in fact come from “pooh†(See our earlier discussion of “poo-poo/pooh-pooh†for more on the confusion of these two terms).
When Gilbert penned the libretto for The Mikado, he gave one of the haughty characters, the Lord-High-Everything-Else who was “born sneering,†the tendentious name “Pooh-bah†(View members of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company doing Pooh-bah’s entrance and aria.). Gilbert probably confected his odd name out of a pair of English derision interjections.
Saying someone was “pooh-bahed,†then, would constitute an eggcorn. Both the verb/interjection “pooh-pooh†and the noun-turned-verb “pooh-bah†share the semantics of extreme haughtiness, but they arrive at the shared semantics via slightly different etymological pathways.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
Cool find, and excellent write-up.
.
One quibble: the sound of a silent plosive is nothing. The plosive in this case is voiceless but not soundless; the puff of the aspiration when the plosive is released is what we hear. (Consonants in general, even voiced ones, and particularly plosives [=stops], are heard much more through their effects on neighboring vowels or aspirations than for themselves.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-04-20 12:58:43)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline
the sound of a silent plosive is nothing
Indeed. Caught in the act by a credentialed linguist.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline