Eggcorn Forum

“A malapropism that makes sense?” Not a bad starting point. The statement contradicts, however, the current “Eggcorn” entry in Wikipedia, which echoes Mark Liberman’s early definition of an eggcorn. There is says that an eggcorn is “not a malapropism.”

Btw, you dismissed “scrimp scampi” as probable cases of inverted homeoarcton (pat me on the back for that word!) (half-Spoonerism ?), probably rightly. But you do get “scrimp cocktail”:

Stock Photo: Scrimp cocktail
Large bowl of shrimp,garnish,lemon,cocktail sauce, with ice filled bowl.
www.dreamstime.com/scrimp-cocktail-image527555

We had the scrimp cocktail which was very good and Porterhouse Steaks @ $49. which were good, but not great. (Alfred’s has a far better steak IMO.
eastbay.citysearch.com/review/41957068

Helle gets scrimp cocktail, and I get prawns in garlic. The prawns are delicious, but it is greasy work to rid them of their armour

(126 ghits—many seemed legit.).

I can’t eat shrimp, but my wife loves them. Still, after paying big bucks for a cocktail that turns out to have only a half dozen shrimp, one might well use the term sincerely.

Without the cocktails:

I’m a scoop up some scrimp sauce, some tartar sauce, and some tabasco and we’ll do it up right. Y’hear?

Growing up, my daughter loved scrimps. We would make about 6 or 7 scrimp cocktails, with scrimp sauce and dig in. She’s 31 now and still calls them scrimps.

And others. Then theres:

“Get me some scrawberries and some scrimp cocktail.” “Yo nigga, you want some fruit?”, “Yeah, I’ll take a scrawberry” “What kind of milkshake would you …
www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=scrawberry

Which suggests there may be a phonological simplification going on: SCCV => scrV. Which reminds me that while most of us don’t permit initial sr, some east Texas and Louisiana dialects say “srimp”, “srug your shoulders”, and so on.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-07-24 12:20:37)

I think Pat said in a posting a while ago that it’s fairly generally accepted that eggcorns are indeed a type of malapropism.

Well, I’m not sure what I wrote, but I was almost certainly thinking of the Language Log post by Arnold Zwicky from almost four years ago in which he wrote that

Eggcorns are a species of classical malapropism (CM, distinct from the inadvertent “Fay/Cutler malapropism”, or FM) originating in reanalysis.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 01390.html

Mark Liberman is obviously a brilliant guy who seems to know just about everything, but I think that in that first eggcorn post he was using “malapropism” in a “popular” sense, rather than in a strictly technical one. Arnold Zwicky, by contrast, is someone who has specialized in (among other things) malapropisms, and I’ve always suspected that he diplomatically slipped in that note on eggcorns as malaprops as a quiet corrective to the Liberman post. I don’t know whether Zwicky’s perspective on malapropisms reflects a more general take on the issue among linguists who specialize in such matters, but he seems to be one of the principal researchers on the topic. And until very recently, at least, he was the professional linguist who had most concerned himself with the technical definition of eggcorns. (By the way, that chunky AZ post is obviously one of the cornerstones of the Database—it’s old hat now, but if you’re interested in what was influencing Chris Waigl when she first started all this, it’s worth a read.)

There’s a frustrating story behind the Wikipedia “Eggcorns” article. It was originally built around that first Liberman post on eggcorns, but that isn’t the only reason that the article considers malaprops and eggcorns mutually exclusive categories. Some years back, the eggcorns article was threatened with deletion because it allegedly violated Wikipedia’s restrictions on neologisms, and there was a move to truncate it and fold it into one of the related articles—such as the one on malaprops or the one on mondegreens. In some ways the threat was a good thing—a number of resourceful people did a lot of work on the article very quickly, and it was soon bristling with impressive references. But there was a tactical problem: if anyone working to save “Eggcorns” admitted that someone with the standing of Zwicky considered eggcorns a subset of malaprops, that would only strengthen the hand of the anti-eggcorn faction. The people backing deletion soon backed down, but in the meantime the perceived inconsistency between the various articles had also become a side issue in the fight, and a number of entries (those on malaprops and mondegreens, and probably others) were brought into line with the idea that eggcorns weren’t malaprops. So the unfortunate truth is that “political expediency” had a role in shaping the eggcorns article and some other ones, as well. Zwicky has actually said on LL that the whole thing left him with a bad taste in his mouth (or words to that effect), and it’s easy to see why.

That’s why writing an encyclopedia “democratically” is simultaneously a fascinating and a problematic undertaking. Democracies require compromise every step of the way, but maybe encyclopedias shouldn’t.

Oh yeah—this is a thread on scrimps. That has me shratching my shalp, too. Italians? Anglo-Saxons with a time machine? Scoot, I dunno.

We could sir try.

Interesting. Have you sworn off Wikipedia as a whole, or just off the Eggcorn article?

fwiw Typo to me is not the same as “inadvertent misspelling”. It is an inadvertent misspelling that arises from the mechanics of typing, especially from a finger slipping on adjacent keys or hitting a key next to the targetted key. There are a lot of inadvertent misspellings that arise from other causes, as witnessed by the fact that handwriting has a lot of them. Let alone, of course, the advertent ones! And of course “advertent misspelling” can be taken to mean “purposeful misspelling”, i.e. I know it is misspelt and choose to write it so anyway, or “advertent spelling by one unaware that it is generally taken to be erroneous.” Lots of distinctions to make.

DT wrote:

Have you sworn off Wikipedia as a whole, or just off the Eggcorn article?

Both, though I always felt weirdly like I had a “conflict of interest” where the Eggcorn article was concerned, so I was mainly a spectator there.

Once you’ve made your way into the dark heart of the beast, you find that Wikipedia has a weird, intense, and often very frustrating subculture. People stake out little squares of turf that they protect with manic fervor, hypersensitivity abounds, epic battles are waged over the difference between American and British spellings, and lots of things are done out of sheer spite. Burn-out is pretty common. But I’ll probably go back if I’m ever in a situation where I feel like I have free time. And I now understand better how to avoid arguments—there are lots of pitfalls for the “neofight.”

DT also wrote

fwiw Typo to me is not the same as “inadvertent misspelling”. It is an inadvertent misspelling that arises from the mechanics of typing, especially from a finger slipping on adjacent keys or hitting a key next to the targetted key.

In a strict sense, you’re absolutely right (and I should have learned by now to anticipate your “that’s not exactly precise” objections, esp. when I’m defining terms). But lots of people on the Web use “typo” in an extended sense, and I’m one of them. I rather like the term “WTF typo” for, say, the instance where you intended to type “parts” but look at the screen and discover that you’ve written “party.” Or “Gnome, Alaska.” My most common WTFT is “are” for “our” or vice versa. I’ve also run across the term ”’teh’ typo” recently. I’m not sure whether “teh” would fall into your defintion of typo or not. I assumed the users were employing the term to distinguish more “mechanical” typos from “neuro-screwup” typos, but I’m not certain.

I’ll add a comment on Kem’s last post in the thread at the re-post.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-07-27 00:48:20)

Replacing “skimp” with “scrimp” would not be an eggcorn. Both are current English words, both mean about the same thing, neither are hard-coded into an idiom. Which you choose is influenced by your language history, English dialect, etc.