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Chris -- 2018-04-11
The August 16, 2006 issue of the Baltimore City Paper contains a review by Michael Corbin of John Updike’s Terrorist. (It’s online here.) Here’s the interesting part:
The terrorist here is reassuring, not merely because his therapeutic ennui is recognizable, but because he forces no one to look at some Achilles heal, some tragic flaw. He has none and, by proxy, we have none. So much for art’s enlightening or redeeming capacity during this time of war.
Apparently, someone (either Corbin or an editor*) is a bit rusty on their Iliad, and having heard “Achilles heel” referring to a weakness, assumed that the word was actually the homophone “heal”. Not entirely unreasonable, really, as heels generally have nothing to do with weakness, whereas healing does. Perhaps they thought Achilles’ tragic flaw was that he had like the opposite of Wolverine’s mutant healing factor?
A quick Google reveals that “Achilles heal” is both a popular podiatry pun and, it seems, a reasonably well-established eggcorn. (Because of the punning uses, it’s difficult to get a good count of the terms use as a true eggcorn. Still, it’s clearly in use by more than a few people.)
* I suspect Corbin himself. He says an Achilles hee/al is a tragic flaw; if he actually knew his Greek literary theory, he’d know that the term “tragic flaw” (άμαÏτία) usually refers to a character flaw, not a physical defect. In Achilles’s case, it was the hubris and obstinance that led him to sulk in his tent, and thus led to Patroclus’s death.
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