Eggcorn Forum

Inspired by Kem’s entry on oakra, I went looking for a long-ago word for me, oakum, which has lots of interesting eggcornical ramifications.

If you didn’t know what oakum was, or you don’t know, what would you think it was? My father, who was a train engineer, showed me oakum when I was young. I remember it being oily and oaken in colour. Here’s a picture of dry oakum, which darkens further when oiled.

Oakum is made from hemp or flax fibres that are either collected from broken down rope, or collected from the heckle following the combing of flax stems, also known as tow. Hence the origin of the word, from O.E. acumbe, “what is combed out”. Before steel-hulled vessels, it was soaked in pitch and used as caulking in the joints of the hull to make them watertight. It is also used to make watertight seals around drains, and as we see below, to isolate switching equipment on the railroad.

How did it morph from acumbe into oakum? Johnson’s dictionary of 1805 suspects that oakum is “A word probably formed by some corruption”. Here we are drawn to corruption. Anatoly Liberman on the OUPblog also finds something contrary about the word. At a time when the letter b was being liberally sprinkled around and tacked onto words such as lamb, dumb, limb and crumb, oakum lost its legitimate b. He thinks this is a rare instance of common sense, since the b is silent. I wonder if it’s not something else: a misreading of the word as containing the root word oak. With suffix um, it would be oak stuff.

Where might it have pickup the initial excrescent o? Maybe in the same bin that that other oak got its own. Oak comes from O.E. ac “oak tree,” from P.Gmc. _*aiks_. In those green and leafy days, the initial ac in acumbe might have looked oaky too.

But I wouldn’t have presented this tissue of speculation were it not for the following exchange I ran across, rife with folk-etymological mechanisms, which illuminates for me how my father might have come to show me the use of oakum a half-century ago. This is from a “railfan” site discussing western railroads, in April of this year.

Help with railroad terms
Q: My wife is proof reading something railroad related and came across the following statement: “storage place for the spikes and the cockanine and the hocum”. She knew what spikes are but has been unable to find anything that may relate to “cockanine” or “hocum”.
Reply 1: Since cockamamie and hokum are so close… I wonder if it’s just someone’s way of saying assorted trash?
Reply 2: Common slang of yesteryear, and not in any particular way railroad slang
cocanine
1) noun, variation of cocaine
2) noun, insanity or nonsense
hokum, hocum
1) noun, slang claptrap; bunk; empty and insincere talk
2) noun, slang, obvious or hackneyed material of a sentimental nature in a play, film, etc.
Etymology: probably a blend of hocus-pocus and bunkum
Reply 3: I seem to recall “Hocum” was a sealer of some sort. The other may be wood plugs that came in a burlap sack.
Reply 4: “Oakum” was a 1- to 1 1/2-inch thick loose burlap twine soaked in some kind of petroleum oil that we used as packing to seal signal installations, nickname “hore’s hair”, utilized as a backer for “Duxseal”, a thick, semi-soft rubbery clay sealer dark gray in color that was hand-worked and packed on top of the Oakum at the surface, nicknamed “Ape S——t”. Many a signal installation where cables enter signal houses at the weatherhead and bottoms of wayside and crossing signal masts are done with hore’s hair and ape s—t to seal out water; rodents, snakes and bugs also find the combination very distasteful. You can still find both at plumbing supply houses.
Reply 5: Never heard it called duxseal but have called it duct seal. Also, the term we used in the service was “monkey s———”.

Wonderful! Replyer number 2 even put his entirely cut-from-wholecloth hokum definition of the nonexistent word cocanine in a convincing dictionary format. My guess for the cockanine and hocum stored in the railroad shack would be “caulking and oakum”.

Last edited by David Bird (2010-06-15 13:17:36)