Eggcorn Forum

English has two words that ought to be flounders, and should even be eggcorn flounders. One of them is “narc,” a slang word for a NARCotics agent. The other is “nark,” a Gypsy word for “nose” that has become a word for a policeman’s informer or a policeman.

To be flounders, the two words would have to be confused with each other. These two, however, seldom are. The problem is that they are separated by several tens of millions of cubic miles of salt water. We can see the problem by looking at the COCA and BNS corpuses. The noun “narc” occurs in COCA with some frequency, the noun “nark,” in the sense given above, once at the most, and probably not at all. The BNC, in contrast, has many examples of “nark,” but no (genuine) examples of slang word “narc.”

One way to check whether the British “nark” and the American “narc” ever get confused is to look at idioms that contain the two terms. “Nark,” we note, often occurs in the phrase “copper’s nark.” When we look for “copper’s narc” we find a few examples that look like they could be more than simple misspellings. Here are two “copper’s narc” citations from American sources.

Bulletin board post by someone living in Southern California and trying to sound British: “Egads! We have cast our lot with a copper’s narc !”

Question by a person from Boston on the Wordwizard site: “ copper’s narc: Heard this watching an old brit flick. It didn’t make sense. Any ideas? ”

We can run the movie in the other direction by looking at the idiom “narc squad.” Does “nark squad” ever occur in a contexture that suggests the person might be confusing “nark” and “narc?” Here are some examples that look suspicious because they come from British sources:

Comment on a British newspaper football article: “when we Preston fans get bashed back into our seat or beaten up and dragged into a dog van for standing and cheering by the nark squad.”

An English translation on a TV France site, possible done by a British person: “If France defends its “cultural exception”, it could also defend its ‘policing exception’ where the fight against narcotics traffic is concerned. The OCRTIS, the elite of the French ‘ nark ’ squad is the unavoidable negotiator within the European Union”

Post on a British poetry forum: “Yes, go for the visit to the drug dealer or a bust by the Nark Squad ”

(One small cloud obscures our view of the “nark squad” examples: “nark” is recorded as a possible spelling of “narc.” “Nark” is not a common alternative, though, and we can see from the COCA example that it is almost unused in edited prose of the 1990s and 2000s.)

The idiomatic substitutions described above suggest that the nouns “narc” and “nark” may be, for people with feet in both British and American English, flounders that can interchange in non-idiomatic contexts. But are they also eggcorns? That is, does the substituted word cause the meaning of the enclosing phrase to be reanalyzed in terms of the meanings of the substituted word, or does the substituted word simply pick up the meaning of the word for which it substitutes? Are, for example, nark squads thought to be drug-busting teams that run informers? Or are copper’s narcs more likely to inform on drug-related criminals? This we do not know, and so I hesitate to nominate them as eggcorns. They are ships that pass in the night; on the rare occasion when they do catch sight of each other in the midatlantic gloom, they don’t seem to be able to identify each other.

Last edited by kem (2009-12-31 20:31:08)