Eggcorn Forum

More eggcorn candidates in the ongoing thread at The Dish. Three of them caught my eye. One is a confession that the speaker once employed “hostage choice” for “Hobson’s choice.” I can’t find any other example of this, so it is probably not an established usage.

Two other eggcorns mentioned in the new posts on this site are, in contrast, well established, and they have not been noted in the Forum. One is “whelps” for “welts.” Almost all the hits for the Google search “large whelps,” for example, are instances of this eggcorn. The switch has been around a long time. When you look up “whelp” in the OED, you even find a separate lexical entry for this mistake:

Whelp. Erron. for welt n.1
1912 in Dial. Notes 3 593 She whipped the horse till she raised great whelps on him.
1952 Publ. Amer. Dial. Soc. xvii. 34 Time was in the upcountry when the teacher would, with a hickory, raise whelps on the legs of a recalcitrant pupil.
1962 W. Faulkner Reivers viii. 181 How the hell did Sugar Boy ever let him get this far without at least one whelp on him?
1980 Verbatim Autumn 17/2 A quite common mispronunciation is ‘whelp’ for ‘welt’: ‘He has some big whelps on his arm.’

The acorn, “welt,” a word borrowed from the craft of leatherworking, refers to a raised strip of leather. It is metaphorically extended to the skin ridges that result from insult and injury. But what does the eggcorn mean and how does it map onto “welt?” All the dictionaries that I have access to give one, and only one, meaning for “whelp,” which is “any of the young of various carnivorous mammals and especially of the dog; a young boy or girl.” (M-W) It is possible that this is the sense of “whelp” that is in view during the eggcornical substitution of “whelp” for “welt.” A welt is the offspring, as it were, of a blow.

There is, however, another possiblity. Dictionaries, we know, lag behind current usage. “Whelp” is widely used to mean “a cry, especially a cry of pain or joy.” It often occurs in the idiom “let out a whelp” (See this Google search.). This newer usage is, I’m guessing, a blend of “whoop” and “yelp.” I suspect that a number of the substitutions of “whelp” for “welt,” especially the more modern ones, have in view this unlexicalized meaning of “whelp.” If so, the transfer of meaning takes a different, more appropriate path, recognizing that the process that leads to welts can be quite painful, evoking whelps of distress.

The other eggcorn in the new posts on The Dish site is “overfloating” for “overflowing.” Quite a common replacement, especially in discussions of washing machines and commodes. There are also metaphorical uses of “overflowing” that suffer the same insult, as in these examples:

Formatting discussion: “The text in these menu items are overfloating on both the right position and the content middel. Anyone who knows how I can fix this, or what the problem is?”

Software forum: “My server is under heavy attack and today my e-mail was overfloating with response mails.”

Labor recuitment site: “Their smiles are broad, overfloating with optimism.”

Last edited by kem (2015-01-08 10:20:22)