Eggcorn Forum

They both seem idiomatic to me, too.

Reading your interesting previous thread on a variation of this, jorkel, was instructive. I’d always thought that “mortal coil” was an archaic or poetic term for the earth, and to shuffle off in that context meant to leave the earth (to walk away with a shuffling gait). Now I see that I was wrong about that.

The common usage you mention of terms like “shuffle off to class” suggests to me that many (probably most) other folks made the same misinterpretation of Shakespeare’s use of the term “shuffle off”, so that the meaning in nearly all English usage is to walk somewhere, whether or not with a shuffling gait. The old song “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” could also be an example, with an added musical/rhythmic implication, referencing the musical meaning(s) of the word “shuffle”.

I assume that the term “shove off” in this context originally meant to push one’s small boat away from the shore as one embarks on a (usually short) trip. I agree that much of the incidence of that usage could be an eggcornish variation on “shuffle off”.

My question was a real one, though. I often don’t know what people mean by “idiomatic”, so when it’s clear they don’t mean what I would, it helps me to ask them.

For me, a phrase is idiomatic if it is so established in the language that it comes out in automated fashion. Another way to say it might be that an idiomatic phrase is a multi-word lexical item (with perhaps a slot to be filled in here or there.) Competent speakers of the language do not have to build it from scratch.

If the phrase is also non-compositional (i.e. if the whole means more than the sum/product of the parts) that may be strong evidence of the idiomaticity of the phrase, but for me that’s an extra, not the essence. Others seem to require pretty clear non-compositionality before they will call something idiomatic.

In this case, shuffle off to LOC and shove off to LOC are both established, thus (by my lights) idiomatic; shove off … is more clearly non-compositional ( shove by itself not being an intransitive verb of motion.)

[fwiw —On my view there are only differences of degree between such idiomatic phrases and standard grammatical constructions, where the slots predominate, e.g. INTRNS MOTION VB + DIRECTION, or “case frames”, e.g. shuffle + DIRECTION. And several of the above may simultaneously be invoked in a speaker or hearer’s mind to sanction (i.e. legitimize) a given usage, e.g. shuffle off to class .]

jorkel wrote:

...I generally consider an idiom to be non-compositional ... that the whole means more than the sum of the parts.

My dictionary gives the “non-compositional” definition of idiom first (therefore presumably preferred), and I’ve always assumed that as the correct definition of the term. Confusingly, the next definition given is “a form of expression natural to a language, person, or group of people”, which I guess corresponds to what we’re calling “simply in-the-language”. I’ll continue to use the term “idiom” in the first (non-compositional) sense, as I find it less confusing that way.

Unfortunately, if you take that too literally then you’ve got smaller fragments (the phrasal verbs) being classified as idioms as well.

I see no problem with that. Why can’t it be both? My dictionary starts the definition of “phrasal verb” with “an idiomatic phrase consisting of a verb and another element…” Granted, “idiomatic” here could be meant in either sense, but I think a phrasal verb which meets the non-compositional criterion would also be an idiom even in that strict sense. For instance, “walk to” would not be an idiom (in the non-compositional sense), but “walk off” would be (unless you’re walking off a cliff), because the meaning of “off” in that phrase is non-deducible from its meaning separately.

Of course, that does leave us with a question that’s impossible to answer with any great certainty: At what point in the evolution of a common phrase do we include the definition of “off” that is specific to idioms like “walk off” in the definition of the word “off” considered as a separate word, and at that point, do we stop calling “walk off” an idiom (in the non-compositional sense)?

Exactly so. Well said, kem.

Probably worth saying that the definition I think we agree on (idioms are words that hang out together until they stick together and we expect them to stay glued together) is the best one to use for talking about language learning (as well as linguistics, computational or otherwise, I believe). A fluent speaker is not one who has learned words and abstract syntactic patterns and can plug the first into the second. His English (or other language) will be fluent or “idiomatic” only when he knows what words will most naturally come next, before the speaker (whether himself or another) has come out with them. This includes but is by no means limited to the cases where what will naturally come next is something no grammarian would expect (i.e. the non-compositional cases).

And, yes, that makes for squishiness about what can be the acorn for an eggcorn. To which I reply, so much the better. I think that’s the reality we’re dealing with.

[btw and fwiw, you said “The questions you all are raising about idioms are good ones. I only wish you had raised them twenty years ago.” I can send you some references and stuff from 25 or 30 years ago where some of us were raising them, if you’re interested.]

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2011-01-26 01:49:17)

David T—I realize that the linguistics crowd has been thinking along these lines for many years. I was the one who wasn’t there. I had bigger fish to fry in those years.

David B—An example? In the line above I used what most would call an idiom: X has bigger/other fish to fry. We can think of the phrase as lying midway between two endpoints. One endpoint would be an alternate phrasing that evokes no sense of inappropriateness. If I had said, for example, “I was busy with something else,” no flags would go up. If I had treated it as an analogy/metaphor, saying something like “It’s as though I was cooking up a mess of fish for a friend and had to refuse to cook up his next batch because I had more significant fish to cook,” again no flags. It’s when we merge the two of these endpoints, the literal meaning and the metaphor, and we do it in a way that obscures the two endpoints, making the result neither literally sense-giving nor figuratively transparent, that we end up with clump of words that can’t be handled by the standard rules that we apply to determine meaning. The words start to travel together as though they were a single term. Like an individual word, the idiomatic phrase can pick up new meanings and lose old ones. The figurative occasion behind the idiom can even be lost and re-invented with new folk etymologies. The idiom can wander into new parts of speech (I bigger-fished him?) and suspend our normal parsing mechanism (Is the plural “bigger fish to fries” or “bigger fishes to fry?”).