Eggcorn Forum

I just finished reading The Lexicographer’s Dilemma by Jack Lynch, a romp through the world of English and its etymologies by a serious scholar and superb writer (A description and some reviews are available in the Amazon listing for the book.). A major theme in Lynch’s book is the struggle between language descriptivists and language prescriptivists, a topic that has excited passions on this forum. He debunks several popular myths, among them the beliefs that Samuel Johnson wrote the first English dictionary (the first appeared more than a century and a half before Johnson’s) and that the dreaded deontologies of grammar derive from eighteenth century prescriptivists (many, perhaps most, of the no-nos appeared in the nineteenth century).

A bit of trivia from the book: The corpus of Shakespeare has only one split infinitive. It’s in sonnet 142. See if you can spot it: http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/142.html

Lynch has an interesting list of English spellings that were the result of Latin backcorrections. These include debt, doubt, subtle, receipt, salmon, and victual. Among the backcorrections are two hypercorrections that might be early eggcorns. He writes on p. 174:

“The spellings delit and delite [for delight ] were common in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries…. [T]he word comes from French delitier or deliter. But some spelling reformers incorrectly thought it was related to English light and put the gh where it didn’t belong. The same thing happened to the word island, apparently through confusion with the word isle. That shorter form is a thirteenth-cnetury import from the French ile and can be traced back to the Latin insula, which is where the s comes from. But the longer word island doesn’t come from Latin at all; it’s a Germanic word, and the early forms are iland or yland. The s, in other words, can be defended in isle, but it doesn’t belong in island.

Last edited by kem (2010-05-09 15:23:03)