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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Round these parts, potters tend to be high-end artists who command a hefty fee for their works. But I have the impression (whether accurate or not) that in many parts of the world potters are subsistence-level artisans, and a similar view on the part of others may be influencing this reshaping.
The phrase “potter’s field†– a cemetery that houses the graves of paupers and the unidentified – must certainly have a role in this as well. That term comes from the the Gospel of Matthew: Judas, overcome with guilt for the betrayal of Jesus, returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests, and then hanged himself; since putting blood-money into the treasury was forbidden, the priests instead used the silver “to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners†(27.7). The potter’s field in this story is usually explained as referring to an area where clay was obtained, but I don’t know how authoritative that explanation is. In any case, it seems pretty natural for the term “potter’s†to be transferred from the graveyard as a whole to one plot in it.
“Potter’s grave†is hard to count since many people named Potter have funeral plots. (And there’s some Lehmann potential here – Potter is capitalized in a few instances when the term is being used of a pauper’s grave.) “A potter’s grave†gets only 58 unique ghits, but this reshaping is planted in some toney places. The first citation is from a book by the well-known California historian Kevin Starr, and the rest of my examples originated with the websites of newspapers or television stations. It seems to have achieved a certain level of acceptance for itself. Examples:
Leaving a note in his pocket, “Too young to receive an old-age pension, and too old to find work,†Price took poison the next day in a San Diego park and was buried in a potter’s grave, just one of the hundreds of suicides by the lonely and impoverished who had been drifting into San Diego since 1929.
http://books.google.com/books?id=7GvgN0 … 1-PA207,M1
[This is from page 206 of the book Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California by Kevin Starr (1997).]
Braintree Deputy Police Chief Russell Jenkins said recently that she never was identified, and eventually was buried in a potter’s grave, on the county tab.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articl … _unsolved/
He was laid to rest today in a potter’s grave at the White Tanks Cemetery. [...] This is Maricopa County’s cemetery for the indigent, those who die with no one to claim them.
http://www.azcentral.com/12news/news/ar … 08-CR.html
[I’ve deleted a number of sentences.]
“I was told he was buried in a potter’s grave, only to find it was a paid grave.
http://www.nj.com/newark/index.ssf/2009 … ruths.html
Is there peace in a potter’s grave? He was the kind of man no one really knew. When he died last year, he was buried by the county in an unmarked grave.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_h … n20695254/
Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-06-05 02:35:12)
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Brilliant. I think you have found an expression in the messy process of birth.
Another example from a 1940s letter written to Time Magazine:
“The local press has led us to believe that the poor old lady earned nary a penny from that song, escaped burial in a potter’s grave only at the last minute when some local society or club stepped in and contributed to a more fitting burial.”
For some reason your first reference says the server is “boosa.google.com” instead of “books.google.com” (yes, some of us do check the contexts of the quotations).
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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For some reason your first reference says the server is “boosa.google.com†instead of “books.google.com†(yes, some of us do check the contexts of the quotations).
Okay, that’s so weird and bizarre I almost left it just as a curiosity. I cut and pasted the URL as usual, so how B.G.C became “boosa.google.com” is a mystery to me. Anyhow, I’ve gone back and fixed the link—you have to scroll up a page now to find the citation, but it works.
{Edit: My use of “first citation” in the first post was unintentionally ambiguous—I simply meant that the Kevin Starr quotation was the first one in my list of examples; I didn’t bother trying to find the earliest instance of the reshaping.]
Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-06-05 02:42:27)
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Okay, that’s so weird and bizarre I almost left it just as a curiosity. I cut and pasted the URL as usual, so how B.G.C became “boosa.google.com†is a mystery to me.
Have you consider taking your computer to an exorcist?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Demonic possession is as good an explanation as I can find. That was so strange that I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it after you pointed it out.
I’m a poor typist, and there have been numerous occasions on which my fumble-fingered blunderings on the keyboard have accidentally replicated keystroke shortcuts that did something I didn’t intend—so perhaps it’s not impossible that I did something that deleted the ks in books and replaced it with sa. But I can’t really imagine how that could have happened. The more troubling speculation is that there might be conditions under which a text gets garbled between the time you copy it and the time you paste it. But that’s equally improbable.
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There is also an intermediate term, popper’s grave/burial /funeral/field, which is likely, I suspect, to sound much like pauper’s in some US dialects. Unfortunately it seems a mere mis-spelling rather than anything eggcornish.
The park, however not a park yet– was built during the 1820’s, and was constructed for the purpose of a popper’s grave site and the location of public …
Both the daughter and Bowering are buried in an unmarked popper’s grave in the Salt ….. She is buried in a popper’s grave in the Salt Lake City Cemetery. ...
The original “potter’s field” is puzzling – it seems such an extraneous detail – unless there was something significant about that trade. If there had been a kiln there then doubtless there would also be a sea of industrial detritus, sharp shards of broken pot and assorted dross. In some cultures it was the custom to break the possessions of the dearly departed and such remnants might be considered unlucky, which might account for the field being deemed suitable only for the burial of strangers. And if those potsherds were of red rather than grey clay the terracotta’d surface could have been regarded as a “field of blood” long before Judas was buried there.
I know it’s been suggested that the field was where clay was excavated, but I can’t imagine anyone digging a grave in clay ground; authorities on such matters, I suppose, may have rarely had opportunity to undergo much first-hand spade-work, but in my own small experience of digging clay and digging graves it seems highly unlikely.
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