Eggcorn Forum

Reading Pete Seeger’s Incompleat Folksinger recently, I came across a reference to soldiers as swaddies. Swaddies? – he must mean squaddies I thought, but on investigation found that Pete’s version, dating from the 1840s, was definitely the acorn. However it came about, the eggcorn seems to have entirely supplanted its parent.

Squaddie – a soldier. Commonly used mis-spelling of the word ‘swaddy’. This derived from the days of the army in India when swaddies were irregular Indian troops used as ‘cannon-fodder’ and for fatigues.
It was also used by the British soldiers of themselves to indicate that they were being treated like swaddies, and this spelling and usage survived at least up until the Second World War in army circles (of the line from Hamish Henderson’s famous song from the Sicily campaign Poor bloody swaddies are weary). This wasn’t understood outside the military and was often mis-spelt ‘squaddie’, particularly in newspapers.
In some English regions during the late 18th and early 19th century, ‘swaddy’ came to be used to mean ‘country bumpkin’.

Interesting ngram here, if I can get it to work… https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c … es%3B%2Cc0