Eggcorn Forum

Welcome, Barbara Partee. This is a great find.

One of our regulars—Joe Krozel—posted on “we have in our midst>>we have in out mitts” a few years ago, but I have to confess that I wasn’t fully persuaded his examples were eggcorns. I find these much more convincing, and I like the way that this form of the reshaping underscores the oppressiveness of being in the midst of something—as if you were the plaything of your remodeling, or your busy season, or of plenty itself.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-07-01 03:20:24)

Is that why I didn’t see anything about midst > mitts when I checked the database? So now you will put it in?

I’ll provide a more detailed answer than you were probably looking for because we’re getting a flood of new members right now, and maybe I can anticipate questions that other newly registered people might have, too.

The truth is that there’s something of a disconnect between the Eggcorn Forum and the Eggcorn Database. They both have the same owner, but they’re effectively different entities. The Database has been pretty quiet in the last year, with only about a half-dozen new entries posted. Just a small number of people have the access to add articles to the Database—mainly the site owner Chris Waigl, as well as Ben Zimmer and Arnold Zwicky. And since writing up an article for the Database can take some time, I think the size of the backlog of material that could make the move from the Forum to the Database has become such that they’ve more or less given up on keeping pace with it.

The people who are regulars on the forum are the die-hard enthusiasts who are willing to keep posting potential eggcorns here whether or not they get enshrined in the Database in the near future. And there’s activity here on the forum pretty much every day. While I’d love to see things start moving into the Database again, for me the most important thing is to keep documenting everything that seems relevant. As long as Chris keeps paying the rent, the raw data will be available for someone to use, get a laugh out of, etc. And I like our little community of committed eggcorn-hunters.

Joe’s “in our mitts” posting was one of the first of his thousands of posts, and I think it wouldn’t make the cut for the Database because most of the “in our mitts” citations could be explained as examples of a perfectly standard usage. There are, as you say, some that are suggestive, but there aren’t many strong, unambiguous examples.

I’m new to eggcorn collecting—should the ambiguous ones be documented too?

In the Database, our gatekeepers try to highlight clear, straightforward, unambiguous examples of an eggcorn. And I think that’s a good policy. But here on the forum, many of us purposely include “borderline” or “ambiguous” examples along with the less questionable ones—I’ll often put citations that might be closer to straight malaprops or misspellings toward the end of my list of examples. I think it’s useful to show the full range.

Is such ambiguity/indeterminacy known to make eggcorns more likely to survive?

I’m not positive I understand the question. And if I do understand it, then I don’t think you’ll find a consensus answer among the regulars here. It’s my own impression that a reshaping will be more common and widespread if it a) makes sense to users and b) doesn’t draw too much attention to itself. But my criteria a) and b) can be at odds with each other. I can illustrate a) through a post I just made on “despicable>>despeakable/disspeakable.” I noticed there that even though “disspeakable” is further from the original form than “despeakable,” it got more Google hits than the latter form. And I think that’s because the “disspeakable” variant was a bit more transparent for users—it turned the first syllable into a more immediately recognizable prefix. As for b), I think a good example is “fearsome>>fiercesome” posted by our regular Ken Lakritz. This reshaping gets an amazing number of Google hits—many, many thousands. And unlike most classic eggcorns, it appears with surprising frequency in edited prose. Books.google.com shows that Anne Rice, for instance, uses it in her novel The Witching Hour. And it also occurs in the work of other popular writers, like Faye Kellerman and Jacqueline Carey. But I think it sneaks past so many editors and others for reasons that also make it somewhat ambiguous as an eggcorn. Truly “classic” eggcorns draw upon “new” imagery that can seem startling if you only know the standard form. “Eggcorn,” for instance, looks pretty strange if you only know “acorn,” and when Mark Liberman first discussed it, there were only a few dozen hits for the term. The “egg” imagery made sense to some users, meaning that it could repeatedly be reinvented independently by certain speakers. But I think it drew too much attention to itself to spread quickly from user to user—people noticed it too easily. In other words, the radical semantic reshaping of the word also guaranteed that its potential set of users was pretty limited. “Fiercesome,” by contrast, draws less attention to itself because “fierceness” and “fearsomeness” are closely related ideas; semantically, the reshaping doesn’t seem so odd. But since “fiercesome” doesn’t have a major change of imagery at its heart, its status as an eggcorn is somewhat ambiguous; it’s a really interesting reshaping, but it doesn’t answer to the criteria for eggcornicity as fully as “eggcorn” does. (I’d say that “fiercesome” lies about halfway between being an eggcorn and being what Arnold Zwicky has called a “flounder.”) So in that sense—yes, the reshapings that are most widespread, that are hardiest out in the wild, tend to have a certain ambiguity to them as far as eggcorn status goes. At least I think so—David Tuggy will probably pop up now to explain why he disagrees.

I hope that makes some sense.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-07-01 16:17:53)