Eggcorn Forum

This is fairly common – 85 ughits for the “corpse of trees” string alone. Some of these may well be mere misspellings for non-rhotic speakers, but there sure are a lot of them out there. It’s easier to argue for the eggcornicity of the reshaping if speakers are imagining a group of leafless, apparently lifeless trees in winter. But the hikers and painting enthusiasts in the following set of citations seem to intend a living bunch of trees:

The descent latterly involved going through a corpse of trees but they weren’t really a problem.
http://www.caledoniahilltreks.com/hills/section_10b.htm

We stopped in a small corpse of trees in a basin at the top of the coulee just below the ridge.
http://www.azbaddog.com/Events/TransMaz … efault.htm

Love the foreground purple and the little corpse of trees. Lovely painting.
http://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/archive … 21405.html

But a strikingly large number of instances appear in descriptions of battles and battlefields. And interestingly, many of these writers use the “corpse” form multiple times. Could they be thinking that “corpse” refers to a group of dead, war-blasted trees?

As the tanks advanced, they approached a corpse of trees. A pang rang out, and the paladin was struck by an enemy anti-tank rocket. The paladin skidded side ways from the blast. The treads stopped, but the tank was not knocked out. The paladins massive turret turned with a hydraulic hum, the barrel pointed out at the trees like a victim pointing at her attacker in a court room. The charge? Attempted murder. The cannon fired, and milliseconds latter the corpse of trees was destroyed.
http://forums.tauonline.org/index.php?t … 655.0;wap2

The ground was nearly perfect – a few low ground swells
barely worthy of the term ‘hill’ and two large corpse of trees, one
right in his center that provided ideal cover for his waiting Whirlwind
to rain down righteous fury from above on the Emperor’s foes. The only
potential problem was the 2nd and larger corpse of trees across the
field on his left flank.
http://www.gameskb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/g … ara-Plains

The British managed to
infiltrate a section into a corpse of trees where they openned fire
on the entire American platoon in the hedge surrounded field. [...] The withering combined
fire eliminated one of the three brish sections and the rest of the
British 1st platoon moved to a wooded corpse of trees nearer the
American sector.
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/po … 60386.page

As a historian and national Park Ranger at Gettysburg, Harman provides a new insight into Lee’s plan of battle at Gettysburg that has otherwise been clouded by too much attention to Little Round Top, a loss of critical survivors of the battle and their reports, too much Confederate fault finding and internal arguments and too much attention given the famous corpse of trees that ended up as the center of Pickett’s (Longstreet’s charges) misdirected assualt.
http://www.aerospacenews.com/pilot-watc … sburg.html

The OED etymology for “corpse” is somewhat interesting; I’ve reproduced it for anyone who doesn’t have access to the original. Long story short: the p in “corpse” is a result of a relatinization of the word’s spelling in Old French. The French were sensible enough to keep the same pronunciation, but Anglophones had started to pronounce the p by the 15th C:.

[ME. corps, orig. merely a variant spelling of the earlier ME. cors (see CORSE), a. OF. (11-14th c.) cors = Pr. cors:{em}L. corpus body. In the 14th c. the spelling of OF. cors was perverted after L. to corps, and this fashion came also into Eng., where corps is found side by side with cors, and became gradually (by 1500) the prevalent, and at length the ordinary form, while at the same time cors, from 16th c. spelt CORSE (q.v.), has never become obsolete. In Fr. the p is a mere bad spelling, which has never affected the pronunciation. In Eng. also, at first, the p was mute, corps being only a fancy spelling of cors; but app. by the end of the 15th c. (in some parts of the country, or with some speakers) the p began to be pronounced, and this became at length the ordinary practice; though even at the present day some who write corpse pronounce corse, at least in reading. The spelling with final e, corpse (perhaps taken from the modern pl. corpses) was only a rare and casual variation before the 19th c., in which it has become the accepted form in the surviving sense 2, which is thus differentiated from CORPS, used with French pronunciation in the military sense. In Fr. cors, corps the pl. is the same as the sing.; in Eng. also the ordinary plural down to 1750 was corps, though corpses is occasional from 16th c. In the 17th c. corps meaning a single dead body was often construed as a plural = ‘remains’, as is still the case dialectally; in Sc., corps pl. gave rise to a truncated singular corp before 1500.

Comparing the history of F. cors, corps, and that of Eng. cors, corps, corpse, we see that while modF. (k{revc}r) has in pronunciation lost the final s, Eng. has not only retained it, but pronounces the p, and adds a final e mute, which is neither etymological nor phonetic, but serves to distinguish the word from the special sense spelt corps and pronounced (k{revc}{schwa}(r)).]

Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-08-21 21:25:39)