Eggcorn Forum

There has been a recent discussion on an IT forum about the words “hare-brained” and “hair-brained” and whether or not one is an eggcorn of the other.

Speakers and writers of English do get confused about “hair” and “hare.” In 2005 Chris added an entry to the Eggcorn database noting the frequent replacement of “hair’s breadth” with “hare’s breath” (On the issue of just how frequent “hare’s breath” is, though, see Chad’s comments in the forum.). We also find instances on the web of “hare shirt” and “hide nor hare of.”

These slips all replace “hair” with “hare.” The discussion about “hair-brained” raises the issue of a switch in the other direction, from “hare” to “hair.” This latter switch would appear to be the most likely one for a speaker of modern English, given the decline in the popularity of the word “hare” (In the corpus of Shakespeare, for example, “hare” is about five times more common than “rabbit;” in COCA the ratios are reversed). The thousands of examples of snowshoe hair on the Internet suggest that speakers do commonly substitute “hair” for “hare.” Whether “snowshoe hair” is more than a pail, though, is difficult to determine, while in the case of “hair-brained” for “hare-brained” the semantics of “hair” and “hare” mingle in a way that raises the eggcorn potential of the substitution.

The problem with calling “hair-brained” an eggcorn of “hare-brained,” however, is determining which one is the acorn and which one is the eggcorn. A quick check with the OED shows that both “hare-brain” and “hair-brain” have track records in the English language that are several centuries long. “Hare-brain” is thought to precede “hair-brain” by several decades, but it’s hard to be certain, since the earliest citations, from the mid sixteenth century, derive from a the period when English spelling was still in flux. In those days “hare” was sometimes spelled “hair” and vice versa. We don’t have enough contextual information in the early citations to know which imagery was being invoked by speakers who used the phrase. Still, the rabbit imagery (i.e., “hare-brained”) has the best claim to lie behind the original phrase, not only because the earliest citations use the spelling “hare,” but also because the proverb “brainless as a March hare,” a reference to the antic behavior of rabbits in the spring breeding season, was already current at the beginning of the sixteenth century.¹ “Hair-brained,” then, by this way of thinking, comes along to replace the rabbit image with some vague picture of a doll or scarecrow whose head is stuffed with hair. Or perhaps even hinting at a person whose head hair grows inward instead of outward.

Addendum: I see four examples on the web of this odd permutation of “hair-/hare-brained:”

Military forum: “I think it was such a hair-grained scheme the ‘powers that be’ back in Britain vetoed it straightaway. ”

Hard to imagine what the writers/speakers have in mind.
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¹ Much later the proverb would become the source of Lewis Carroll’s March Hare character in Alice in Wonderland .

Last edited by kem (2010-01-13 00:12:14)