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Chris -- 2018-04-11
The phrase as I learned it is “allay my fears”, as in to calm them. Yesterday I heard “waylay my fears”, which sounded rather neat: to wait for fear to come by then attack it and prevent it from going further.
Here are some quotes in the wild
Can anyone waylay my fears about Exetel?
... the safest thing I could do to waylay my fears was to turn off my television set for a good part of the day
I’d like to see what it’s all about and maybe waylay my fears,
Even the five-foot deep foundations for the beams didn’t waylay my fears of that rock plummeting to earth unannounced
all of which seem more in line with the milder allay over the more aggressive waylay.
—Andrew Dalke
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Great eggcorn, Andrew. Both “allay” and “waylay” are slightly archaic. “Waylay,” though, gained new life with the advent of the oaters. I can hear John Wayne growling the word. With its increasing popularity, “waylay” became a natural candidate to replace the dying “allay.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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If you do an advanced search on Google Books for co-occurrences of the words “Indians” and “waylaid,” restricting your dates to 1850-1910 (before the advent of western films), you get hundreds and hundreds of hits—many of them from late 19th C histories of what were then called “the Indian wars.” I don’t think “waylay” was becoming archaic before western movies came on the scene; if the term turns up a lot in those films, that may be because it had broad currency in the sources scriptwriters were using. And I suspect that “allay” is here to stay—so I hope I can away your fears in that regard.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-01-07 21:56:01)
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