Eggcorn Forum

Not sure that anyone has ever mistaken a Bengal tiger for a bangle tiger

Joe, “bangle tigers” is a classic eggcorn for the ages and should really have its own thread, don’t you think?

Here’s a companion for the old-timers: crone’s disease. The serious auto-immune disorder Crohn’s disease was named after American gastroenterologist Burrill Bernard Crohn. There are two main ages of onset: teens to twenties, and then fifties to seventies.

Jasmine has crone’s disease and has dealt with it all her life.
(http://www.onefemalecanuck.com/2009/06/ … as-of.html)

I’ve been thinking about the term “anti-Lehmann” (Aunty Lehmann?) for these common but illicit deproperizations of nouns. The term is a fun twist on “Annie Lehmann.” The “anti-“ implies that these terms are the product of a semantic machine that runs in the opposite direction from Annie Lehmanns. And this is exactly what happens with these eggcorns, isn’t it? Instead of taking in common nouns and spitting out proper names, the machine takes in proper names and spits out common nouns.

My only hesitation about the term is a small quibble about which direction is forward and which direction is reverse in this machine. The license given by English to substitute a proper name for a common noun is given out grudgingly. Annie Lehmanns are, as a consequence, relatively rare. In contrast, English liberally promotes the conversion of proper nouns into common nouns. With a little work we will turn up, I suspect, a good many Aunties, Since, then, Annie is an Aunty most of the time, it seems a little odd to have the forward lever on the machine labelled with the reverse-sounding “anti-Lehmann.”

Now that I think about it, this is a really small quibble, almost on the level of arguing which shoe one should put on first. I’m ready to add “anti-/Aunty Lehmann” to our growing list of technical terms for eggcorn events.

One more. Bain Capital is a large, Boston-based venture capital group with an unsavory reputation for buying weak companies and repairing the balance sheet by firing lots of workers. The alternate spelling of their name- which looks like something out of Dickens- is grimly appropriate. 1200 ghits:

... 35 years of increasing profits until Consolidated Stores (the people who owned Big Lots) sold them off to Bane Capital Management… three years later, ...
consumerist.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view…id…

Bane Capital owns both companies. They also own everything else in this world pretty much.
www.absolutepunk.net/showthread.php?p=15393231

...because the venture capitalist of Bane Capital Inc. specializes in finding ways to take your money …
fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/687259.aspx

After all, prior to becoming Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney ran Bane Capital—a firm specializing in turning around failing companies.
townhall.com/blog/g/a2d11314-ffc8-4c13-9dd4-d2047e06adbb

Boston-based Bane Capital LLC is buying the North American phosphates unit of Rhodia SA, France’s biggest specialty chemicals maker, for $550 million.
www.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2004 … ily42.html

What about transformations represented by names like “Bernie Madoff?” Hundreds think, with some justification, that the man’s name is Bernie Madeoff. Would this be an Aunty Lehman? The surname has not been transformed into a full common noun, as it has in the Aunty Lehman examples mentioned above. Instead, the semantics of a similar common noun have been read back into the spelling of a name.

We have seen this phenomenon before in our discussions of “Mr. Grabgrind/Gradegrind,” “Pokeman,” and “Burden’s Ass.”

The examples given for prototypical anti-Lehmanns are much more eggcornical than Annie Lehmanns are. It’s too bad that pronunciation might make Aunty Lehmann confusing, because that form captures their eggcorneal side. As eggcorns, it seems to me that a new signification given to a proper name could go in any direction. It’d be useful to have Ken’s response – did he choose nouns and adjectives purposefully?

In Ken’s post, I think by “sand hill” he must be referring to “Sam Hell”.

I reiterate my affection for “bangle tiger”. Bangles are multicoloured glass bracelets traditionally worn in abundance by Indian women. The connection to the many-banded tiger that prowls the mangroves of the Bengal is strong and too good to let slide.

Dixon wrote:

Since klakritz defined Anti-Lehman as ”...the misconstrual of proper nouns or adjectives as common nouns or adjectives”, “Madeoff” wouldn’t qualify as one, since the proper name Madoff is here misconstrued as a verb phrase, not a noun or adjective. But since this misconstrual is really the same process whether the result is a noun, adjective or other part of speech, I propose that the definition of Anti-Lehman be broadened to include misconstruals which yield non-proper words/phrases regardless of the part of speech. How about it, folks?

I certainly agree that it would not make sense to exclude cases where the part of speech changes as part of the restructuring: they in fact would tend to be the more striking cases.

However, the end product here is not a verb phrase, but (as kem noted) a proper noun, specifically a last name, just a name that is built from a verb-phrase rather than from something less clearly specified. (A Slavic patronym-forming – off suffix may be recognized within it by some hearers/readers, but surely not all.) There is plenty of precedent for this in English: Shake-spear for instance … It might also be that made should be taken not as the preterite form of the verb but a participial (adjective- or noun-like) form.

So if we are to consider this an anti-Lehmann/aunty-Lehmann (like David B I prefer the ladder) we must not define the term as “a misconstrual which yields a non-proper word/phrase (regardless of the part of speech).” Probably it would be “a misconstrual which restructures a proper noun (regardless of the part of speech produced in the course of the restructuring.)”

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-12-24 14:21:38)