Eggcorn Forum

patschwieterman · 2011-07-04 04:27:15

When I first moved to the town I now live in, a sign advertising â€œSelf-storageâ€ was located directly across the street from a sign for a â€œProfessional Buildingâ€ â€“ two of my favorite ambiguous signs in one neat package. And perhaps “self-storage” is what the following writers have in mind when they describe â€œstowawaysâ€ as â€œstoreaways.â€ This may be a central African regionalism â€“ many of the instances I saw were associated with Nigeria or Kenya. Examples:

The ruling class should be ashmed of themselves that our people are dying in droves in the wilderness and highseas as storeaways just in the name of checking out to Europe, as if money is on the streets in those places. Yet we engage in luthocracy in Nigeria.
http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/H … illed_.csp
[â€œPlutocracyâ€ was probably the target word for the Googlenonce â€œluthocracy.â€ Canâ€™t explain that one.]

Insurance company’s do not honour claims caused by storeaways either by
death or cargo loss/damage or delay on delivery.
http://arc.peacecorpsconnect.org/view/1246
[This page â€“ written by a person with an address in Kenya â€“ has numerous examples of the spelling.]

“I was a storeaway on a ship. They caught me and sold me into slavery.”
http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewto … t=21160905

The female lead is a storeaway on the Flying Boat but she meets James who points out that she did not show her ticket.
http://histclo.com/the/movie/n/if/eng/me-nsny.html
[The writer uses the correct spelling in the preceding paragraph. This may be a case of â€œpartial correctionâ€ â€“ in which a writer later catches the first instance(s) of a misspelling but not following ones â€“ but in any case weâ€™ve seen this puzzling phenomenon on many occasions over the years. This website also seems a bit quirky â€“ it appears to be about boysâ€™ clothing in old movies. Recent bad experiences have my ickiness alarms going off very quietly, but Iâ€™ll give them the benefit of the doubt. But Iâ€™m not going to look around….]

Last edited by patschwieterman (2011-07-04 04:27:51)

kem · 2011-07-04 10:39:55

A hearty addition to the storeaway << stowaway eggcorn in the data base.

The cognate “bestow” ” also lends itself to replacement. On the web there are examples of bestole on and bestore on that seem to be substitutions for “bestow on.” “Bestore” is a head-scratcher, though. Could “bestore” be a word in its own right? Dictionaries don’t seem to note it, but the OED does have one citation for it, from the 1600s, and Google Books tells us that “bestore on” has appeared in print at least three times. The examples on “bestore on” run to the religious—pleas to God to bestore blessings.

“Besole:”

Forum post: â€œthe amazing gift we bestole on othersâ€

“Bestore:”

Web fiction: â€œFocus on what wondrous deeds you can bestore on heads of children great and small.â€

patschwieterman · 2011-07-04 16:15:13

Kem wrote:

A hearty addition to the storeaway << stowaway eggcorn in the data base.

You had me going for a moment. I had checked “Google Search,” but not the Database, so I embarrassedly thought I’d posted an eggcorn that was already in the Database. But you clearly meant “stoleaway.”

No matter the status of “bestore” in contemporary English, I think the use of it you found is eggcornical, or at least flounderesque. I’ve been wondering for years now whether the prefix is making a comeback. My students use it much more often than I’d expect, and it shows up in words like “begifted,” “bemocked,” “becheated,” “belidded,” “belittered,” “besmacked,” etc. Most of these turn out to have OED entries when I go looking for them, but not entries in, say, MW. My guess is that they’re reinventions (rather than survivals) driven by a surprisingly well-informed sense of how the prefix has traditionally been used in English. I think its popularity among novice writers comes from its “archaic”/”formal”/”writerly” feel; “unbeknownst” is a similar (if standard and common) word that I think they often like for the same reasons, but it’s one I find too stilted in most contexts. I’ve come to believe a be- prefix revival is underway, but maybe it’s always been “bubbling under.” These days, the subjunctive also seems to have more life in it than the handbooks think; in the last five years or so, I’ve been surprised with the regularity with which 18-22 year olds will use the subjunctive correctly in contexts in which the indicative is both acceptable and far more common. Weird things are afoot.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2011-07-04 16:15:47)

burred · 2011-07-04 22:05:25

Your suspicion bethwacked me, Pat; there is an upturn over the past decade. See also bescratched.

“Luthocracy” was probably reaching for lootocracy, which appears to be an African neologism. You have to wonder if it was not modelled on plutocracy.

Democracy as lootocracy: the Nigerian example
Nigerian epaper

As diatribe is to dire tribe, so stow away is to storeway. “How are you travelling, by railway, roadway or seaway?” “None of those, I’m going the storeway.”

Hmm there is a storeway aboard my ship -why did you come aboard my ship?
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index … 318AA5row2

THE MOON,I WAS A STOREWAY ON A ROCKET ONCE
What’s the remotest place you’ve been to, betting forum

they should help Grenada just as how you come to help Grenadians bway ah agree with you you know, doh care if they are a refugee or a storeway or even illegal.
Spice Islander Talk Shop

Heres a Burg background sheet, and a sheet of this part in the game where alex ramus luna and nall hide in barrels to storeway onto a ship lol.
Ripping adventure game

kem · 2011-07-04 23:06:33

You had me going for a moment. I had checked â€œGoogle Search,â€ but not the Database, so I embarrassedly thought Iâ€™d posted an eggcorn that was already in the Database. But you clearly meant â€œstoleaway.â€

Just checking to see if you were on your toes. (note subjunctive)

I was bemused, bewitched, and bedazzled by your beguiling suggestion that the â€œbe-â€œ might be becoming a new morpheme to our benighted begats, that it is no longer beneath their behavior to betimes begrudge the bestrewing of the language with words that begin with â€œbe-.â€

Last edited by kem (2011-07-04 23:10:49)

David Bird · 2011-07-05 12:52:07

Now, bestole on. This initially had me bewildered, especially since you didn’t remark on it, Kem. I finally figured out that you must have thought it a slam dunk verbing of bestowal. Is it possible that it is seen as begifting a stole upon?

A quick statistical examination of the betrending of be- shows that this is a highly significant trend that started abruptly about 10 years ago. Trending positively were beheld, besotted, beholden, bewildered, bejeweled, belittered, betrothed, bemocked, bestrew, betimes, begrudge, benighted, begotten, bedraggled, and besmirched. Negative trends occurred only in words that had been on a recent high in any case: bemused, bedazzled and bedevilled. Only one word had no trend since 2000: begifted. Besmacked, belidded and becheated do not appear in the n-gram corpus. Probability of the null hypothesis of no be-being trend, based on this informal survey, was about 2 chances out of a 1000, so the tendency is real.

kem · 2011-07-05 13:39:12

Beadwof loves this betrending toward AS and would like to point out that be- words are staples in Teutonic tongues. If this trend bides, then perhaps someday English will not be â€œFrench badly spokenâ€ but â€œGerman badly spoken.â€

patschwieterman · 2011-07-05 14:55:31

Nice to have a statistician in our midst. (Now please explain Google ughits….) I thought something weird was going on in student papers, but it never occurred to me to go looking for empirical confirmation—this trend is actually more striking and widespread than I guessed. And so many of these seem to display a significant positive bump right about the year 2000—both “beknown” and “unbeknown” head steeply upward right then, for instance. Maybe it’s a sort of steampunkish compensation—once we all got futuristic by jumping onto the internet in the late 90s, we felt the need to revert to Victorian-sounding language. Well, probably not. Could it be that be- words have been trending upwards for decades, and that the stuff we’re seeing is a further articulation of something already afoot? I note that bedazzled and unbeknownst had huge increases in the latter half of the 20th C. I haven’t looked at any others, but maybe this all started with an increase in the usage of well-established words and has now started to give the prefix back a little bit of its earlier productivity as it’s attached to words that haven’t tended to take it. Wild speculation, I know, but I’m a bit too bedazzled to come up with any cool, becalmed explanations.

burred · 2011-07-05 17:36:13

I think we’ve been misled by the smoothing on the n-grams. Look at this n-gram for ‘olden’ with a smoothing of 3, and this with smoothing of 0 (no smoothing).

Is it possible we’re seeing the effect on publishing of the appearance of Google Books in 2004? It has become so much easier to access the olden literature, and to quote it. And from there, to the adoption by the literate students that Pat might see?

patschwieterman · 2011-07-05 18:15:09

I guess you’ll need to explain to this statistically less literate person why the difference between the n-grams leads you to suspect that we’re simply seeing more older quotations in recent publications being counted as recent usage.

Also, do lots of recently-obsolescent words have N-grams with bent tails?

patschwieterman · 2011-07-05 18:33:29

So I figured out what you meant—that amazing spike at the end of the unsmoothed data. And you’re right. I came up with a list of words more common in the 18th and 19th Cs than later—musick, phaeton, chirurgeon, mercer, Mussulman, oaten—and everything experienced a pronounced spike after 2004 if I reduced smoothing to zero. And the increase was often as visible against 1980-2008 as against 2000-2008. Kinda fascinating in itself, but it does deflate one’s enthusiasm for the be- prefix.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2011-07-05 18:34:47)

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#1 2011-07-04 04:27:15

"storeaway" for "stowaway"

#2 2011-07-04 10:39:55

Re: "storeaway" for "stowaway"

#3 2011-07-04 16:15:13

Re: "storeaway" for "stowaway"

#4 2011-07-04 22:05:25

Re: "storeaway" for "stowaway"

#5 2011-07-04 23:06:33

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#6 2011-07-05 12:52:07

Re: "storeaway" for "stowaway"

#7 2011-07-05 13:39:12

Re: "storeaway" for "stowaway"

#8 2011-07-05 14:55:31

Re: "storeaway" for "stowaway"

#9 2011-07-05 17:36:13

Re: "storeaway" for "stowaway"

#10 2011-07-05 18:15:09

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#11 2011-07-05 18:33:29

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