Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
From the journal Nature today:
Pact to preserve vast swathe of wilderness faces reluctance from industry and resistance from native groups.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110330/ … E-20110331
There are vast swathes of this variant on the web, a spelling that I’d never encountered before. Contains notes of scythe and bathe for me, to not say slice, slithe and wabe. Not an eggcorn, or probably even a blend since it may have been the original spelling, but teeters on the edge of strange to me. Or is it “swath” that is the odd one, containing strains of “path”, or backformed from “swathes”.
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I assume, on the logic of clothe/cloth, bathe/bath, teethe/teeth, wreathe/wreath, and breathe/breath, that “swathe” would be the spelling of the verb and “swath” the spelling of the noun. The Google N-gram comparison of the noun swath/swathe shows that the spellings were more or less interchangeable until the beginning of the twentieth century. Then logic kicked in.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I was familiar with the variant “swathe,” but I’ve been noticing it a lot in the last few years—I don’t know whether it’s becoming more common or whether I’ve just become sensitized to it. In any case, there’s a good discussion of the pair (along with “loath/loathe”) at a copyediting site: http://www.copyediting.com/wordpress/?p=399
It’s weird how many pairs of this kind end in th: breath/breathe, bath/bathe, cloth/clothe, loath/loathe, sooth/soothe (that last one is kind of the odd pair out, but it turns out they’re related). In Old English, verbalizing suffixes started with a vowel, meaning that the consonant preceding the suffix was typically voiced; my guess is that terminal -th in English is more likely than other consonants to keep its prevocalic voicing even after the suffix has disappeared from speech altogether. I’m not quite sure I’m right on that, however.
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While virile young men uncover their torso
In the virile young way that the maidens adoreso;
And paunchy old uncles, before they bathe them,
In voluminous beach-robes modestly swathe them.
(Ogden Nash, more or less, i.e. as memory serves)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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