Eggcorn Forum

You probably, like me, have several distinct circles of acquaintances. There are people at the office, buddies at the pub, email correspondents, neighbors, relatives/in-laws, old school chums. For the most part these circles do not intersect. In a world stretching toward seven billion people, we have lots of room for the circles to expand without touching.

When a person from one circle accidentally shows up in another circle–the new hire in the cubicle next door turns out to be a classmate from elementary school, the plumber we picked out of the yellow pages turns out to be our spouse’s second cousin once removed–we wonder at the coincidence. Could something so unlikely have been a simple accident? Charles Fort, we begin to suspect, may have been onto something.

The circles intersected in a strange way for me this week. For my current book I’m working on a chapter that deals with ecosystems and biogeoclimatic zones. In this chapter I tell the sad story of Frederic Clements, a founding father of North American ecology. Clements studied at the University of Nebraska. He and his fellow student Roscoe Pound put together the first plant geography of Nebraska when they were working on their dissertations. Clements went on to achieve fame in plant science. Pound, who abandoned botany to study law, attended Harvard Law School, stepped into the Dean’s job there, and eventually became one of the seminal figures in American jurisprudence.

Roscoe Pound was born into a prominent Nebraska family. His father was a state senator. Roscoe had a sister, Louise, who also achieved a measure of fame. Louise studied at the University of Nebraska, the University of Chicago, and the University of Heidelberg, then became a professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Her books and articles on American folklore and folk ballads were her ticket to fame. In the 1950s she was elected the first woman president of the Modern Language Association, the MLA.

In chasing this chain of connections through the Internet, I discovered that Louise Pound, whose name I came to know through my writing and interest in natural history, shared some of my fascination with word construction, blends and etymologies. I came across this 1913 article of hers. It’s a fun read, partly because it mentions some words that were current a hundred years ago that are not seen much today, words such as slantendicular, solemncholy, grandificient, sweatspiration, boldacious, boldrumptious, Sealpackerchief, Pneu-Vac, Locomobile, mercerize, promptual, sneakret, and kissletoe-vine.