Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to
The forum administrator reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.
Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
He is an accomplish to murder. I agree… with the previous poster saying that he should choose his friends wisely.
Now, if your accomplish to murder and kiddnapping was arrested days after the crime, would you stay at your home? Would you not want to run?
In that respect, Sidonis was an accomplish to murder and got away with it. But as it was, he was an accomplish to murder and couldn’t get away with it
You’re saying that my friend gets to keep the television and doesn’t get tried for being an accomplish to crime.
(Plenty more hits too.)
.
The accomplice helps the perpetrator accomplish the crime, so the semantic connection seems fairly reasonable.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline
Nice! I was surprised myself to find that the etymologies are quite different. Accomplish is related to complete, as in fulfill, and accomplice to complex, as in implicated.
Offline
The Online Etymological Dictionary goes farther, revealing that accomplice was originally complice, as in one who is complicit, “with a parasitic a- on model of accomplish, etc., or perhaps by assimilation of indefinite article in phrase a complice”. So the word accomplice was born of an eggcorn squash.
Oooh, that felt pretty good.
Offline
A-complice. Perhaps we should start a list of article-metanalysis words to complement our list of n-metanalysis words.
One would suspect that article-metanalysis would be more common in the multitude of languages that bind gendered articles with their nouns-Spanish, French, German, Greek-than in languages whose nouns are geneally anarthrous, such as Latin and English. (Now that I have this previous sentence, I wonder if I might have it backward-speakers of languages with articles commonly attached to nouns might be more careful, because of the article’s higher frequency, about article-metathesis.)
Another word in English that has played fast and loose with its article is “anatomy.” For some centuries an “atomy” was a skeleton, presumably by misanalysis of “anatomy” as “an atomy.” Though in this case the article was dropped, not assimilated.
Last edited by kem (2010-10-24 12:04:46)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline