Eggcorn Forum

Like most young men who grew up in the American west, I toyed with the cowboy look. At one time or another I sported a buckskin-fringed jacket, a red bandana, cowboy boots, western snap shirts, and bolo ties. But there was one line that, as a teenager, I never crossed. The cowboy hat, the traditional ten-gallon Stetson, defined a town-and-gown boundary. Those who adopted the hat as daily wear made a statement that I was not ready to make. I knew that, no matter how important the history the American West was to my formation, the subculture marked out by the regular use of the hat was not part of my identity.

Perhaps social markers have changed over the last half century. I’m not in close enough touch with young westerners to know what wearing the hat today might mean. One thing, though, I do know: all of us in those salad days were wrong about what the “ten-gallon” descriptor meant. We always assumed that it was some metric of size. The story I heard were that the hats were used to water a cowpoke’s horse. The cowboy with a ten-gallon hat knew just how much water he was giving Ol’ Paint. It doesn’t take a physicist, however, to see that gallons and hat sizes do not match up. Ten quarts, perhaps, but ten gallons?

The current story-which I have no reason to doubt-is that “gallon” was a mishearing of “galón,” a Spanish word for a braid. Apparently Mexican cowhands used to wear braids attached to hatbands. You’ll find the story here, in one of the Straight Dope posts: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/rea … gallon-hat .

There are two versions of how the switch happened. In one version, mentioned in the Straight Dope post, English-speaking Americans mistook the Spanish word for braid for the English “gallon.” In the other version, the switch happened in Spanish before it was handed over to English. “Galón” refers to a braid, but it is also the Spanish word for the measure that we call “gallon” in English. Of the two, I find the second scenario more plausible-why would English hearers have translated “diez” into “ten” and transposed the word “galón” into “gallon?” If the word was eggcorned in Spanish, however, English hearers could simply have transferred it into English as a calque.

The “galón/gallon” confusion is not the only explanation for the origin of “ten gallon.” For a fascinating alternative having to do with movie stars, see the 2002 discussion of the Straight Dope post at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/sho … ght=gallon