Eggcorn Forum

Analogy is perhaps the most potent single factor driving change in a language and has always been so. It affects all layers of speech and is clearly seen in the phonology and grammar, while semantic or lexical analogy is the kind of analogy that causes a word or phrase which strikes a speaker as wrong to get reshaped to look more like something already familiar to that speaker. This may impact the word’s form or its meaning or both. What starts life as the imagining of a single speaker (let’s call it Type A) may then sometimes get taken up by other people. If taken up, it may spread and become a recognised alternative to the orginal word or phrase (Type B), though with localised or minority deployment and often despised as uneducated. If it survives this phase, it may then become an ‘official’ form in the language as a whole (Type C). In some instances the new form may replace the original and become the sole form in the dictionary (Type D).

I knew an old gentlemen for whom the accelerator in his car was always and only its “exhilarator”. I take this to be Type A. For Type B one could cite “chaise lounge” for “chaise longue” and “carry van” for “caravan”. As Type C consider “catchup” as a variant of “ketchup”, and, for Type D, “admiral” from Arabic “amir al (bahr)”. Most of my examples here are of foreign origin in English, and reshapings do indeed occur with borrowings much more frequently than with native words. This is true of all languages at all eras, but one needs a record of the audit trail to be sure, which is why it is harder to recognise instances in dead or non-literate languages.

A speaker who finds the unfamiliar term uncomfortable may be thought of us feeling an urge to make it more comfortable by altering it so as to incorporate an item of pre-existing vocabulary, which acts as the model or attractor. Sometimes only a part of the target term gets reshaped, such as Type B “spara-grass” for “asparagus”, and sometimes the whole gets reshaped, as in Type B “sparrow-grass” for the same, both of which are in my dictionary. It is important that the attractor not only has a shape similar to the target’s, but has a meaning that can be felt as related to the composition or usage of the object, process or concept denoted by the target term. The “grass” element in the foregoing examples is a plant, as is asparagus, and so fits well. The second stage here is to take the first element as a bird name, with the assumption of parallelism with “goose-grass”.

The creative process can be both swift and comprehensive, as in this mock dialogue based on a real case:

step 1: The current form clashes with its presumed origin: “There’s no ham in my hamburger!” step 2: The form is reshaped to fit its imagined etymology: “It must be a beefburger.” step 3: Sometimes a new lexical element is born as well: “Do they make a turkeyburger too?”

In my research into the effect of folk etymology upon the names of plants found in ancient Greek, Egyptian and cuneiform texts, I have being toying with ways of measuring the effectiveness of the changes wrought. I would value opinions on the following method, which uses a threefold “comfort score”. Each element is like a probability between 0 and 1. The first is an assessment of how well the outcome fits the target in shape, and the second how well in meaning. Both start at 0, and a score of 1 1 shows that the speaker’s urge has reached maximal comfort. The third digit marks how much the new form has reached total and exclusive use in the language. It is covenient for now to use ½ to denote any fractional score. Here are some examples from British usage, showing target, attractor(s), outcome, rationale and score:

amiral, “admire” & words such as “integral”, admiral, such an admirable officer, 1 1 1 chaise longue, “lounge”, chaise lounge, you lounge on it, ½ ½ 0 ça ne fait rien, abstract phrase of dismissal, san fairy Anne, = SFA & nicer than ‘sweet f* all’, 1 ½ ½ accelerator, “exhilarator”, exhilarator, as every car driver knows, 1 1 0 divan, “dive” & “on”, dive-on, that’s what you do to it, 1 1 0 caravan, “carry” & ” van”, carry van, it’s a type of vehicle, 1 1 0 asparagus, “grass”, spara-grass, it’s a type of plant, ½ ½ 0 asparagus, “sparrow ” & “grass”, sparrow grass, like ‘goose-grass’, 1 1 0

Sincerely, Stephen Durnford