Eggcorn Forum

I’ve been reading Mary Beard’s new book on Pompeii (The Fires of Vesuvius). Beard mentions the discovery in the ruins of Pompeii of several strange ceramic vessels with spiral tracks on the inside. These vessels, it is generally believed, are examples of gliraria, devices mentioned by Roman writers. Gliraria were used to rear a glis, a dormouse. You can see pictures of the inside and outside of a glirarium on this Spanish-language blog.

Dormice are rodents, usually mouse-sized, though some species of dormice can grow almost to the size of squirrels. They are native to Europe and Asia and are most common in the areas around the Mediterranean Sea. In the Americas you will only see dormice in pet stores and zoos. To see a picture of a dormouse, view this video, a news report from a British TV station about recent attempts to restore this endangered rodent to the English countryside.

The Romans did not raise dormice as pets, as we do. They were a popular table delicacy. Boiled dormice were often dipped in honey and/or poppy seeds before being eaten. A glirarium was therefore a piece of kitchen equipment. One could imagine, though, that Roman children took some enjoyment from the presence of the cuddly rodents and their litters (“Gaius, don’t play with the glires-we’re going to eat it on the ides!”)

Dormice are famous for their long hibernations. Some have been known to remain in a state of dormancy for as long as half a year. Speakers of English often called them “sleepers” and said that boring people were “dull as dormice.” Since hibernating dormice must spend so long without food, they are capable of storing large quantities of fat in their tissues. This is presumably what makes them so tasty.

The word “dormouse” is thought to derive from the Latin word for sleep (dormire) via the Norman French adjective dormeus, “sleepy one,” though we lack the definitive documentation for this conjecture. By the sixteenth century the current spelling, “dormouse,” had established itself. The “mouse” part may be an eggcornical adaption of the final syllables of “dormeus.” The first syllable also makes the word a candidate for this forum: many people spell the name of the animal “doormouse.” Perhaps they think of this widely-domesticated rodent as living indoors, or near the doors, of houses.

Frequency on the web: huge, reaching perhaps two percent of the frequency of the correct spelling. Some examples of “doormice:”

Transcript of a BBC interview: “Last winter, we had intended to film doormice. But at a time when they would usually have been hibernating, the animals were still active. ”

A blog comment on HBO’s Rome series: “Other details I liked were eating doormice, the surgery that Titus Pullo got done on his head, the exploration of male and female relationships”

Posted email on a British transportation site: “*Doormice,* protected under EU and UK law, have been found on the route of the proposed Lamberhurst Bypass.”

Last edited by kem (2015-02-14 13:28:17)