Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Glands were first acorns before they were squirty hormonal organs. Eggcorn, gland—same thing. Here’s how the online ED puts it:
Gland, n. : 1690s, from French glande (Old French glandre “a gland,” 13c.), from Latin glandula “gland of the throat, tonsil,” diminutive of glans (genitive glandis) “acorn, nut; acorn-shaped ball,” from PIE root *gwele- (2) “acorn” (cognates: Greek balanos, Armenian kalin, Old Church Slavonic zelodi “acorn;” Lithuanian gile “oak”). Earlier English form was glandula (c. 1400); Middle English also had glandele “inflamed gland” (c. 1400). Extended from tonsils to glands generally.
Our metaphor-crazed ancestors saw muscles as hypodermal mice, and swollen glands in the throat as wayward acorns. A revealing blog post explains how confusion between glands and acorns goes way back. Translation from the Latin of coincident plague outbreaks, in the form of magna pestis glandularia and scintilla lepre, led to a confused description of these twin blights as an outbreak of leprosy overlapping with a heavy crop of acorns. Acorns are still called glands in French, leading me to embark only hesitantly, with trepidation, every year, on my description of the significance of bumper crops of acorns. It’s raining glands. We’ve previously skirted the issue here and here.
Bumper crops of acorns occur in mast years. OE mast meant “food,” and was cognate with meat. I only learned this year that humans eat acorns (I suspect that the recipe must involve some special detoxifying preparation). And here we finally get to the point of this post: one more in a long chain of personal admissions to eggcorneal thinking. Mast year for me was understood to be one in which there was a large regeneration of trees that would all grow up straight and tall and provide abundant choices for the production of ship masts.
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Not only do humans eat acorns. Entire first nations cultures were built around acorns as the staple crop.
Like you, I was late in coming to the realization that acorns were so important in human history. It was only when I moved to the NA West Coast and started looking at indigenous societies that I became aware of the significance of acorns. Discussions of the world’s staple crops, such as this one in Wikipedia, typically overlook the acorn connection.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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A mass year. Makes better sense than mast in this millennium.
Everyone who has ever lived in the country knows this, one year there is a bumper crop (mass year), followed be a lean year. It’s an endless cycle.
http://www.rappnews.com/2013/12/05/edit … ne/126446/
increase in mice and deer correlate with acorn mass year
https://quizlet.com/82104902/biol-quiz-10-flash-cards/
Just keep monitering the site cause he’ll be back, he knows where the goodies are. It gets really tough if the acorns are in a mass year.
http://hotspotoutdoors.com/forum/ubbthr … r-question
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I’ve not come across the notion of a mast year before, and only ever heard it pronounced mash, which underlines, I suppose, its use as food for domestic and other animals:
Deer get by on acorns, beech-mash, honeysuckle, and whatever is in the food plots planted by hunting clubs, usually clover turnips or corn.
Blackberries and whortleberries for jams. nuts for winter consumption, acorns and beech—mash for pigs, acorns again for the neighbour’s rabbits or the village …
It is fond of acorns, beech mash, the berries of the hawthorn, the seeds of the wild rose, and the tubers of the Jerusalem artichoke.
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Peter, the word “mash” as a noun carries definitions such as “a mixture of crushed grains used as food for animals” and “a soft pulpy mass or consistency”. Some of the examples you give could refer to mash in the first sense being fed to livestock. In other cases “mash” could refer to the second definition above, some naturally occurring thing with a pulpy consistency. (I don’t know what “beech mass” would be, though.) Of course, it’s also possible that someone is eggcorning “mass” for “mast” sometimes. It’s even possible that confusion with the meanings I just mentioned could contribute to such eggcorning.
Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2015-08-22 16:29:17)
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Dixon, those who, arcing a gentle toe through autumnal debris beneath beech trees, called that litter mash also used ‘crusses’ for ‘crusts’. And ‘joyces’ for ‘joists’ for example. I grew used to mentally correcting such errors, but was frequently flummoxed when later required to utter one of these many dubious words. Which version for which audience? This is a difficulty which has not entirely disappeared.
Beech mass would, I imagine, be a mass of beech mast, but oddly there are no examples, though there is this:
... to hold an Inquisition on behalf of the Lord of the Manor, concerning payments for pannage, the feeding of swine on oak and beech massed in the woodlands.
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Peter Forster wrote:
Beech mass would, I imagine, be a mass of beech mast, but oddly there are no examples…
I’m unclear on what “beech mast” is. I thought “mast” referred to a bumper crop. What would beech mast be—a mass of beechnuts, or of beech bark that’s been sloughed off, or dead leaves, or…?
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What would beech mast be—a mass of beechnuts, or of beech bark that’s been sloughed off, or dead leaves, or…?
Here’s an interesting definition from the online etymological dictionary:
mast (n.2)
“fallen nuts; food for swine,” Old English mæst, from Proto-Germanic *masto (cognates: Dutch, Old High German, German mast “mast;” Old English verb mæsten “to fatten, feed”), perhaps from PIE *mad-sta-, from root *mad- “moist, wet,” also used of various qualities of food (cognates: Sanskrit madati “it bubbles, gladdens,” medah “fat, marrow;” Latin madere “be sodden, be drunk;” Middle Persian mast “drunk;” Old English mete “food,” Old High German muos “meal, mushlike food,” Gothic mats “food”).
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