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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Ode to a Hidden Eggcorn
There is no wood in woodchuck,
No cock in cockatoo.
Halt in halter? Never!
No good in “Goodbye, Sue.”
When it comes to kissing
the lipless tulip fails.
And Genesis is wrong:
females aren’t made from males.
Don’t try to chow on chowder.
Witch hazel names no witch.
The fish they find in crayfish
will make no fishers rich.
Seeking worms in wormwood
is just a waste of time.
The house you see in penthouse?
Nothing but a rhyme.
Remember has no member
Like forget has a get.
Liquorice is a liquor
But that’s an accident.
Don’t pull the pull in pulleys
or look for pests in pester.
Popinjays are sad ’cause
Pop and jays aren’t guests there.
Kid gloves for kids, you say?
I say “Poppycock!‗
an oath whose cocks don’t crow,
whose poppies have no stalk.
Mary has no rosemary,
nor does her sister Rose.
Who put the bad in badminton
Not even Webster knows.
Last edited by kem (2010-12-23 16:15:12)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Great poem, Kem; it’s an instant classic!
Strangely enough, there’s no house in penthouse and no hang in hangnail, but I haven’t been able to get these observations to rhyme.
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Wonderful! To post on my wall.
I especially loved the imperfect rhyme of pester/guests there – somehow rang perfect in an eggcorn ode.
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My dalliance with Calliope was an attempt to move from my list a bunch of hidden eggcorns that didn’t seem to merit individual posts.
A couple of the words, however, might be worth noting in a little more detail. The “pest/pester†confusion is a classic hidden eggcorn. “Pest†and “pester†both come to English from early French, but “pest†ultimately derives from the Latin term for a plague, while “pester†traces its roots to a Latin word for a shackle, a horse hobble. On the way to becoming a verb, “pester†picked up an initial “in-†in Latin, then lost it in English (but not in French, as we can see from empêtrer). If most people don’t see “pest†in “pester,†I’ll manger my chapeau.
“Pulley†shares a branch of the etymological tree with “pole,†both words deriving from a Greek term for a pivot, an axis. It has no historical connection to the word “pull,†which has Teutonic roots. “Pulley†arrived in English through French (cf. French poulie). It is possible that the “u†vowel in the English spelling may have been influenced by the belief that the word “pulley†had some connection to “pull.â€
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I didn’t know that many of these gems were nouveaux! Even wonderfuller then.
I learned a new word, too – empêtrer. As you say, apparently it’s a relative of pasture and not pest. Which makes the parallel existence of the word empester all the more interesting. This one does carry the plague, and kept its s too, like a malign bacillus.
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Just to confuse matters: empêtrer was at one point empestrer in French (the modern circumflex marking, as it often does, the omission of historical “s”), and, according to the OED, English once had a word “impester” having the same literal and figurative meanings as “pester.” “Impester” was current from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, presumably kept alive by litterateurs who believed that English was actually “French, badly pronounced.”
Last edited by kem (2009-07-23 00:14:37)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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