Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
They have wings, so logically they’re pengwings, right?
Benedict Cumberbatch is the most famous victim genius to use this word, having memorialized it in a nature documentary:
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Wings?!? Those beautifully sculpted appendages are flippers!! Their medium of motion is the ocean! Would you refer to an eagle’s flippers?
But seriously, pdxuser, you raise interesting questions. It is generally assumed that ‘penguin’ comes from the Welsh pen = head and gwyn = white. This was used in the early days of exploration to describe the great auk. The term subsequently migrated to describe the penguin instead, once the great auk’s sad extinction was accidentally accomplished, and the penguin rather inconveniently has a black head.
Had the original Welsh namer encountered a ‘penguin’ before spotting that great auk, it would be called a pen = head du = black. A Pendy! What would your beloved Benedict Cumberbatch have made of that?
(I stoutly resist the impulse to tease out anagrams of that actor’s name, but I fear I may wake in the early hours writhing amid delirious variants.)Offline
You gotta love these examples (and there are thousands of them) where a mispronunciation makes unexpected sense. And it does not matter if it makes sense to the original speaker or to the subsequent listener (or reader or whatever). What matters is if the new sense becomes standard for anybody. If BC (or somebody else) not only says “wing” but thinks “wing” when he says it and thinks everybody thinks that, then it’s an eggcorn for sure.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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