Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Heard from a friend tonight: ”...they were edging him on…”
Found 165,000 ghits for ”’edging him on’”, which may be a mixed bag of meanings; only 30,100 for ”’egging him on’”, though over 38 million for “egg someone on”
Discussion here http://www.wordwizard.com/phpbb3/viewto … 304#p36304 suggests the two were once one – anyone?
Mainly, I’m pleased to catch one in the wild, particularly so eggy an eggcorn.
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For twenty-first century speakers, substituting “edge on” for “egg on” fits the canons of eggcornicity. Given the historical yoking (yolking?) of these two expressions, a skeptic might have concerns about dialectical refugia, language communities in which older semantics have been retained. Danish speakers of English (which may be everyone in Denmark) might constitute one of these elusive refugia.
I wonder what it would be like to use the same word for “knife edge” and “egg,” as Old Norse does. Most native speakers of Modern English associate eggs with roundness and bluntness. At some earlier stage in the line that led to modern English, the ideas associated with (chicken) eggs gave more credit to the sharp end of the egg. As George Lakoff points out in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, word classification schemes can alter reality in odd ways.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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“Egg” and “egg” are actually two different words in Old Norse—the word meaning “egg” is neuter, and the one meaning “edge” is feminine. They will end up looking the same in a number of declensions, however (though not, e.g., in the nom./acc. plural), and then you’d have to depend on the differences in articles or adjectives, or of course on context to tell which is which.
The dictionaries say “egg” for “edge” is still around in Modern Icelandic, but the word I’m familiar with is “brún.” “Egg” for edge certainly shows up in the older skaldic poetry, which was very interested in the edges of weapons, and I suspect that it sounds “poetic” or archaic to modern Icelandic ears.
Still, it’s an interesting point—I’d somehow never thought of the possible confusion.
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This discussion of etymology has me wondering…
...what imagery of “egg” is intended in the idiomatic usage “egging [someone] on” ?
Depending on the answer, the idiom may be functioning as a stealth eggcorn.
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