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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
We have had far gone conclusions and four-gun conclusions, but the mess of forgo, forego and forgone has other eggcornish aspects.
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There are (at least) two relevant meanings of prefixes pronounced “forâ€: one the meaning “previous, ahead of (in space and/or time)†and the other a sort of negative meaning sometimes glossed “awayâ€. The former (foremer?) is often spelt fore and the latter for , but each has often, over the centuries, been spelled the other way as well. Cf. (for the first of the two) forerunner, forementioned, foreknowledge, foresee, foreplay etc., and for the other, forgive, forget, forswear, forbid , etc.
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Foregoing then would mean ‘going ahead of/previous to’ , and forgoing could mean (and did come to mean) ‘going away from, abandoning, relinquishing, doing without’ . But each of these meanings has often enough been used with the other spelling over the years.
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There are eggcornish overlaps of meaning in various places which may have been prompted by, and may of course have prompted as well, the spelling overlaps. These are particularly noteworthy in the case of foregone conclusion .
In Shakespeare’s use of the phrase, which may not be the first use but certainly was important in popularizing it, Othello [III.iii] says it of (Iago’s report of) Cassio’s dream, and it is clear from the context that Othello means he believes Cassio actually has been in bed with Desdemona before he allegedly dreamed it. This sounds like “happening beforeâ€, i.e. it is something that happened before it was reported, not something dreamed of (and perhaps thus a premonition?).
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But usually when we use the phrase we mean something rather different: we mean a conclusion that was jumped to, arrived at apart from any argument. This could be either “a conclusion reached before any argument, one that has gone ahead under some other steam without an argument†or “a conclusion that has abandoned any pretense of argumentâ€. Or it might mean “an action that is undertaken without (i.e. while forgoing) (the whole process of argument and) conclusion†From any of these the (also very strong) modern meaning “needing no argument, inevitable†can be derived.
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Not a very pretty eggcorn, is it?
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-06-20 18:45:08)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Not pretty? It may be old and wizened, but it has inner beauty. Thanks for pointing out the confusion.
We should be forshamed that our language has lost its wonderful “for-” prefix, at least as an active morpheme. For hundreds of years it was a potent source of new English words. Not only have we lost the prefix, we have acquired an active bias against the words we once made with it: a prodigious number of obsolete English words begin with “for-” (These are hard to see in in standard English dictionaries, since they usually omit archaic words. The OED, in which 30% of the headwords are obsolete, is a treasure grove of these “for-” gravestones-forbliss, fortorn, forshattered, forgab, forglut, etc.)
One of these good “for-” that words we seem to have shed, or are in the process of shedding, is “forspent.” The American poet Sidney Lanier, who often employed archaic words for special effects in his poems, made effective use of “forspent†in his famous The Ballad of Trees and the Master.
The German cognate “ver-” has also lost some of its potency. “Ver-” is one of the inseparable prefixes in German, prefixes whose morphemic quality is so lost on modern German speakers that they hesitate to let them go for a walk without their radicals. My impression, however, is that German has done a better job keeping its “ver-“ words than English has its “for-“ words. Germans still make up new slang words with “ver-.” Hard to imagine an English speaker coining a slang word that started with the “for-” prefix.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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By “pretty†I meant something like “exhibiting an immediately pleasing beauty that is easily taken inâ€; I agree with you that there is a convoluted beauty, fascinating in a dusty antiquarian way, about this case.
prefixes whose morphemic quality is so lost on […] speakers that they hesitate to let them go for a walk without their radicals
Classic kem. I love your way with words.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Burred foreneeded this post to forfend his forsaken forebrain.
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