Eggcorn Forum

In recognition of Holy Week in the Eastern and Western Christian churches (2010 is one of those unusual years in which the date of Easter is the same in both major halves of the church), a possible Easter eggcorn.

The word “crass,” deriving from the Latin word crassus meaning dense or fat (as we can see by its French descendant “gras”), is generally employed in English in the metaphorical sense of stupid, unrefined, insensitive. “Crass” isn’t a common word in English, leading some speakers and writers to reach for sound-alikes. The word “cross,” from the Latin crucis, seems to lie closer to the retrieval surface. A scan of the Google hits for “cross” in canned phrases that use the word “crass” turns up many examples of the substitution. See the Google searches for cross materialism and cross commercialism.

The semantic motivation for the switch, if there is one, may be sense of “cross” that describes an attitude (cross = dissatisfied, angry). More likely, though, it is impelled by the fact that a cross, an instrument of torture and death, is a crass way to die.

Last edited by kem (2010-12-10 22:12:24)