Eggcorn Forum

The song and the movie screenplay seem to be paraphrasing (very loosely) “The Kingdom of God”—a poem by Francis Thompson, a British Catholic poet of the Victorian period. Here’s the fourth stanza:

The angels keep their ancient places—Turn but a stone and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.
http://www.holytrinitynewrochelle.org/yourti14380.html

Thompson died in 1907, but the poem had some fame during his lifetime, and you can still find it on religious websites—along with his most famous work, “The Hound of Heaven.” And David, you may be interested to know that the Wikipedia article on Thompson attributes a phrase used in a landmark Supreme Court decision to that latter poem:

His most famous poem, “The Hound of Heaven” describes the pursuit of the human soul by God. This poem is the source of the phrase, “with all deliberate speed,” used by the Supreme Court in Brown II, the remedy phase of the famous decision on school desegregation.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Thompson

(And hey, that was long before the Court was full of Catholic justices.)

I checked Literature Online, but couldn’t find any uses of the phrase before Thompson.

The phrase sure does sound odd—I have vague memories of being confused by it as a kid. But it’s actually part of a pattern of (weird) compounds involving “many” and a noun. “Many-headed,” “many-hued,” “many-storied,” and “many-windowed” all get tens of thousands of ghits, and most of those don’t (obviously) involve a verb. But they sure
feel old-fashioned these days.

I should have remembered the First Law of Word-Hunting in my earlier post: Check the OED first! Turns out that the OED has an entry for “many-splendored,” with a citation that predates Thompson:

1858 Southern Lit. Messenger 28 7 In the night-time, come the spirits, yet if the night be *many-splendoured they come not.
a1907 F. THOMPSON Kingdom of God in Sel. Poems (1908) 131 ‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces, That miss the many-splendoured thing.
1962 Sunday Times 25 Nov. (Colour Suppl.) 29 (title) The many-splendoured fisherman.
1980 S. TROTT When your Lover Leaves (1981) 65 My life seemed so boring to describe and yet to me it was rich and many-splendoured.

That said, I personally wouldn’t consider “many-splendid” an eggcorn. An eggcorn has to be a fundamental reinterpretation of the meaning of a word. “Many-splendid” substitutes the adjective “splendid” for a less familiar adjective based on the closely related noun “splendor.” I think most speakers would instantly recognize the connection between the two words. And even though the meaning of “splendid” is broader than that of “splendor,” the semantic overlap is still pretty clear. Both phrases create the same meaning through essentially the same thought process, so the unexpected shift in perspective needed for an eggcorn seems to me missing here. .

I’m a fan of Daniel Johnston’s art and music. This one’s from his portfolio

Others echo the sentiment. There are about 10 unique hits. No “many-specialed” things though. It seems to fit suzie’s theory about many being understood as very, or maybe in many ways.

Love is a many special thing, and most of us can not understand it most of the time.
http://flametails2323.xanga.com/431918552/love/

love, love, love its a many special thing that some of us achieve and some of us fail
http://consciousevolution.com/LindaGood … pics/70440

Last edited by burred (2012-10-10 17:38:02)