Eggcorn Forum

I happened to check the etymology of sackcloth and was informed that it is, unsurprisingly and quite literally, sacking, i.e. cloth from which sacks and bags (rather than clothes) are appropriately made. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the late 13th century (±50 years before Wycliffe) as the origin date for the sense of penitential or mourning garb.
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What caused me to check was the realization that in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Esther 4.1) the word is שַׂ֖ק, which transliterates as saq. It also matches the Greek σάκκος (sakkos, e.g. Mat 11.21), which in fact is likely borrowed from some branch of Semitic, and Latin saccus (<Gk.) as well. English sack seems to be Germanic, however it was likely a very early borrowing from Latin there.
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It seems at least possible that this was an old etymological eggcorn, perhaps of the half-conscious variety, by those with some education in the Biblical languages, which caught on well and early. Of course it is also possible that sacking was independently used for penitential clothing and called by that name, which by pure serendipity happens to sound like the Hebrew, Greek and Latin words, or that some pre-Wycliffer who perhaps knew a bit of Greek and Hebrew (and certainly Latin) used it quite consciously in informal translation and it caught on. Anyhow, at the least it’s an interesting coincidence.
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Not as good as sadcloth , but still. (Kem scooped this post in that one, noting the saq/sack coincidence, but, perhaps wisely, didn’t claim any eggcornishness in the origin of the English word.)

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2016-01-01 12:38:36)