Eggcorn Forum

In Love’s Labor’s Lost, in the section of the play I quoted in an earlier post, the Latin-lobbing schoolmaster Holofernes confuses “ingenuous” and “ingenious” when he says “Mehercle, if their sons be ingenuous, they shall want no instruction”

“Ingenuous” originally meant native/freeborn and eventually became a synonym for noble/highborn. The adjective was extended to the qualities of nobility, eventually taking on the sense in which we employ it today: a term for frank/honest. When Holofernes says the sons of the locals are “ingenuous” he is referring, it appears, to their status as freeborn, perhaps highborn natives. But when he goes on to say that they won’t need his tutoring services, he has switched in the meaning of “ingenious,” a word for clever/talented, that derives from a different Latin source.

It is not entirely clear, however, that Shakespeare is faulting the Latinate English of schoolteachers in this passage. “Ingenious” was a common spelling of “ingenuous,” at least until the late eighteenth century, when lexicographers finally took some pains to sort out the confusion and get the spellings and meanings of the two words aligned to the modern norm. Holofernes, adhering as he did to the Elizabethan standard, would have thought that the spelling “ingenuous” had two completely different meanings – that is, that “ingenuous = freeborn” and “ingenuous = clever” were homographs/homophones. He did not, then, so much switch two words as switch the two senses of a single word. This explanation fits better with what we know of Holofernes from the play. His great sin in Love’s Labor’s Lost is a hyperndulgence in Latin-influenced word puns, not the inability to handle Latin derivations. He had too much Latin, not too little.

Interestingly, the early lexicographers, who won their battle in the case of “ingenuous/ingenious,” tried but failed to rectify the parallel misuse of “ingenuity.” “Ingenuity,” which, as we can see from the internal “u,” derives from “ingenuous,” is treated in modern English as the abstract noun of “ingenious.”

We don’t use the word “ingenuous” much these days, but we do put to work its negation, “disingenuous,” as a synonym for fraudulent/mean/insincere. You can see the frequency of the two words passing each other on a Google Ngram. “Disingenuous” is well on the way to becoming a word with a lost radical.

The word “disingenious” is not part of modern English. On the web, however, we can find hundreds of examples of “disingenious.” This respelling was noted in one of the earliest posts in this forum. What the earlier post fails to note, however, is that in most cases the writers are simply misspelling the word “disingenuous.” Here are other examples that would probably be classed as misspellings:

Thread name on Irish forum: “Why are so many Unionist Politicians so disingenious ”

Comment on a Huffington Post article: ““To the tea party members. Your concerns are usually disingenious. Your opinions of the occupy movement arent needed.”

Bulletin board post: “its important to see people fight back against disingenious bullshit.”

There are cases, though, in which the users of “disingenious” seem to be importing some or all of the meaning of “ingenious” – i.e., they are using “disingenious” in the sense of stupid/silly rather than hypocritical/fraudulent. Here are a few of these:

Title of an entry about a stupid mistake by another financial analyst: “ Disingenious Analysis”

Health forum: “The next day, my friend sent me an e-mail stating that his e-mail of the day before was a bit ” disingenious ”. Well, I just love it! I no longer tell people that I did something “stupid”. I will now say. I believe that what I did might be construed as a little “disingenious ”.”

Forum discussion on NCAA basketball policy: “I could understand wanting to implement hardcore amateurism during the college years, as backwards and disingenious as it seems to me, but punishing the player from something that happened before he played there seems ludicrous. ”

Between these two uses of “disingenious” – as a misspelling of “disingenuous” and in the “dis” + “ingenious” sense – are, I suspect, a number of writers who are eggcornically importing a part of the meaning of “ingenious” into their word “disingenious.” They are saying, in effect, that an act is both deceptive and silly.

Last edited by kem (2011-12-21 16:06:58)