Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Okra, the mucilaginous vegetable that is the basis of the famous creole gumbos, is the immature seed pod of a West African plant. The vegetable made its way into Asia and Europe during the Middle Ages. It appears to have come to North America, not from Europe, but from Africa, as a by-product of the slave trade.
One reason we think the plant came directly to North America from Africa is that English, unlike most other European and Asian languages, adopted a West African word for the name of the plant. The earliest citations for the borrowed word come from British Carribean colonies.
Over the years the English name of the plant has assumed a variety of spellings–ocro, ochra, okro, okry, etc. Spelling alternatives have been pruned away in modern English dictionaries, leaving only “okra.†We note on the web, however, a persistent tendency to misspell “okra†as “oakra.â€
The “oakra†spelling may be just another bit of junk to toss into the dustbin of phonetic accommodation-”ok,” pronounced as “ohk,” is an unusual initial phoneme in English. One small aspect of the switch, however, gives me pause. Does anyone else think that okra pods resemble elongated acorns, the seed of oak trees?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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As you say, quite a stretch for a long eggcorn. But I’d buy it.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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In the UK I knew them as “lady’s fingers” before I heard okra being used, I think in West Indian contexts. So it depends on which English you’re talking about. As it often does.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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Topologically, okra is to acorns as coffee mug is to donut – same number of holes. But if you look inside – voila.
Edit: the point being that the seeds look like eggcorns.
Last edited by David Bird (2011-07-05 15:39:38)
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“Gumbo,” interestingly, also seems to derive from the name given to okra. It comes from a central African, Bantu word that is the basis for the word for okra in many of the romance languages.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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