Eggcorn Forum

For it to be a good eggcorn, the perps need to be thinking of an axe and somehow making sense of that in the context of questioning. I have a hard time thinking of such a rationale: are they somehow chopping the question, or splitting it open? More likely it is more a phonological variant: the perps mean ask but at some point they or those they learned from found it easier to pronounce it aks instead.

I understand that pronouncing ask as “aks” is considered standard in at least some black American dialects. I reckon most or all such instances—even those uttered by white folks influenced by black dialects—are attributable to that, rather than to some eggcornish process. I assume that it originated in a simple mispronunciation of a word that’s a little challenging to pronounce, though that raises the question of why they don’t also pronounce risk as “riks”, task as “taks”, etc.

Dangat wrote:

...Dr. Anne Curzan, linguist at the University of Michigan, explained to us that “aks”, or “axe”, meaning “to question”, has a much longer history in English than does “ask”. In fact, according to her, “aks” or “axe” was the “high-culture” way of using the word up through the 16th century, while the common folk used “ask”. Anybody know anything else on this topic?

I looked up ask and aks in the Google Ngram Viewer (which only goes back to 1500). I didn’t include axe or ax in my search because their much more common other meaning would distort the results. Here are the results. Note that ask, which far outnumbers aks throughout, is found from before 1500 (with a gap in the mid-16th century), while aks doesn’t show up at all until after 1650. If aks were the upper-class form back in the 16th century (when books were mostly for and by the upper classes), wouldn’t we expect it to predominate, or at least show up, on the Ngram for that period? But I’m hesitant to dispute the expert’s opinion on the basis of an ngram. Maybe they spelled it axe or ax back in those days?

The Online Etymology Dictionary entry for ask lists a bunch of early roots and related cognates from various languages, most of which have the s sound just before the k sound, and none of which reverse that order. But then it goes on to say: “Form in English influenced by a Scandinavian cognate (such as Danish æske; the Old English would have evolved by normal sound changes into ash, esh, which was a Midlands and southwestern England dialect form). Modern dialectal ax is as old as Old English acsian and was an accepted literary variant until c. 1600.”

Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2015-09-27 14:54:34)

bluecrab wrote:

Similarly, my car—a Ford Escape—has been heard to be called an “Excape.”

I’ve also commonly heard ecspecially for especially and ec cetera for et cetera. Note that in those two examples there is a c later in the word which is not pronounced as a hard c. Perhaps people are unconsciously compensating for that by putting the hard c sound in the first syllable? Or perhaps they are assuming the very common ex- prefix?

Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2015-10-16 13:47:26)