Eggcorn Forum

Gretna Green, in southern Scotland, is the British Las Vegas. In the nineteenth century it was a notorious destination for runaway couples seeking quick and legal matrimony.

Jane Austin makes use of this village and its reputation in her novels. Before Lydia, for example, runs away with Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, she writes to her friend “You will laugh when you know where I am gone, and I cannot help laughing myself at your surprise to-morrow morning, as soon as I am missed. I am going to Gretna Green.”

Other nineteenth-century British writers made use of the racy Gretna Green setting. One of these was Hannah Maria Jones. An obscure writer of potboilers, Ms. Jones published Gretna Green, or the elopement of Miss D- with a gallant son of Mars: Founded on Recent Facts in 1821. In her novel, a pretentious—and underlettered—character, a Mr. Deputy Dickens, buys a used carriage. To impress the object of his affection, he visits the College of Heralds to acquire a coat-of-arms that can be painted on the door panel. Mr. Dickens remarks “As handsome a court-of-arms as one would wish to see of a summer’s day.”

Mr. Dickens “court of arms” slip—admittedly an intentional phrase from the pen of Ms. Jones—can be frequently found with no pun intended on the web. It appears to be an active eggcorn. “Court” and “coat” have little semantic overlap, of course—it is a DNA eggcorn, triggered by the ready association of coats-of-arms and the courts of English nobility.

Ken Lakritz long ago noted, by the way, “code of arms” for “coat of arms.”