Eggcorn Forum

Leavings from my file of “tendentious spellings.” These are words that are misspelled in a way that introduces another word and the replacement fits in with the semantics of the replaced portion. I’m not sure that any of these four are eggcorns – call them eggcorn wannabes.

(1) Ragoo. A ragout is a thick stew. If it’s really thick, is it a ragoo?

Food discussion: “ To please a hungry husband she advocates a meal of sliced cows’ feet, or a ragoo of pig’s ear garnished with barberries.”

“Ragoo,” by the way, is a well-established spelling. It shows up as an alternate of “ragout” in the early part of the nineteenth century.

(2) Toedy. “Toady,” a word used to describe a flatterer/sycophant, is a nineteenth-century shortening of an earlier “toad-eater.” A toad-eater, says the OED, was “the attendant of a charlatan, employed to eat or pretend to eat toads (held to be poisonous) to enable his master to exhibit his skill in expelling poison.”

Could the spelling “toedy,” as in this example:

Military forum: “But don’t expect India to be a toedy.”

be importing the image of someone kissing toes? Or an image of a conformist “toeing the line?”

(3) Melancolic. A person who has a melancholic temperament was once thought to have an excess of black (Gr. melan- ) bile (Gr. cholia). Melancholic people are sulking, angry, despondent. Similar, perhaps, to a colicky baby—which may explain some examples of “melancolic” written in place of “melancholic.”

Music discussion:) “If you’re into melancolic rock music, check out the tunes on….”

“Colic,” by the way, has nothing to do with bile: it is a cognate to “colon.”

(4) Shitchat. Chitchat can be boring, but if it gets too boring and trivial, it’s “shitchat,” at least in the minds of a number of web page authors. An example:

Games forum: “well im not really trying to get anything outa this just want to have a nice shitchat with people about this matter, but people tend to go aggressive or not give any useful arguments/statements”

“Shitchat” may be nothing more than a semi-phonic misspelling. It could, though, be edging into eggcorn territory.