Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
From nydailynews.com, concerning actor Andrew Koenig’s suicide:
A friend found Andrew’s body two hours later off a bridal path and called Walter. The dad, who traveled from Los Angeles to search for his son, was nearby and went straight to the site.
http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2010/ … vers_.html
I wasn’t able to spend any time looking for other examples, and I was surprised not to find this one already in the database, because I’m sure it’s a common mistake. On Google, of course, I find lots of wedding references, using it as a pun.
“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” – Lily Tomlin
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I’m less surprised it’s not in the Database because I’m not sure it’s an eggcorn. Mixing up word-terminal +al and +le is exactly the kind of spelling error I’d expect people to make. And I’m having trouble finding a way of justifying the reshaping: why would people expect brides to be using horse paths? But maybe there’s a way of making sense of this in eggcorn terms that I’m not thinking of.
I’m glad you brought this up, though. It never occurred to me before how odd the term “bridle path” is. Why do we refer to horse paths in terms of the thing used to control the horse? Why not just call them “horse paths”? And in fact they were called “horse paths” (late 18th C) a few decades before people started calling them “bridle paths” (early 19th C). But that raises another question: did English have a special name for such paths before the 18th C? (And it occurs to me I’m assuming horse paths and bridle paths are the same, but I don’t really know that. Maybe we have an equestrian in our midst who’ll know more.)
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Thanks for the comments, Pat. I see it as an eggcorn mainly because of the confusion of meaning. It’s not something you see in writing very often, and parks are a common venue for weddings, so I think people who misuse the term really don’t know that the real term means a horse path. Many (city folks, at least) probably wouldn’t even have a guess as to what a bridle path would be used for.
Bruce
“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” – Lily Tomlin
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This expression (“bridal path”) came up at the end of the bridal shower discussion (http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=2875 ).
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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