Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
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In the discussion of gnarl < gnaw here , I had written
Gnarled looks like it must be formed from a verb to gnarl …The likelihood of some sort of blending ( gnawing and gnashing with snarling , perhaps?) adds to the beauty of it.
Dixon Wragg replied:
Actually, gnarl is a back-formation from the earlier gnarled, and the blending you mention doesn’t seem to have been involved.
The following response seemed general enough to warrant posting in this section (or maybe it should be the Soapbox section?).
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If Etymology is the issue. But I was thinking not of how the word arose historically, but of how it is structured in the mind of a modern speaker, someone like you or me who encounters the word gnarled and tries to understand it or reason it out. Yes, figuring that “it must be formed [in such and such a way]†is what is meant by back-formation. This particular back-formation happens thousands if not millions of times (discounting the millions of speakers who never encounter and thus never use the word), and for most of these speaker-analysts knar presumably does not enter into the picture (until they look it up in an etymological dictionary). But blending or incipient morpheme-formation (orthographic gn meaning some kind of pressure and/or twisting, perhaps) may well do so.
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Etymology writeups are useful, and often educate us (me at least) about historically possible or likely (to the point of being quite certain) linguistic sources we were unaware of, such as in this case knar , or Shakespeare’s one use of the word gnarled . But like dictionary entries they (over)simplify things, often pointing to the most likely explanation or account as if it were the only one. (I have spent years in dictionary work ―not in English―, and believe me, I know this!)
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It is axiomatic (and to me at least it seems self-evident) that linguistic systems are, and by nature must be, re-created in every generation, and in fact in every speaker in every generation. Etymology deals with that recreation in times past, especially at the time when a word or other structure first began to be used or at least can first be documented.
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I think the re-creative process is much more important than many otherwise language-aware people (especially those of an authoritarian bent) are likely to want to admit. It surprisingly often does recreate something that parallels the historical development in astonishingly great detail. But it may often come up with a plausible analysis or explanation that contradicts that historical analysis.
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I have appreciated Kem’s motto, that shows up on all his posts: “Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.†That sentiment (or should I call it an empirical observation?) fits with the idea I was trying to express above: language changes not just when new words or phrases (or whatever) become standard, but also when old standard expressions are understood in a new way. And that is close to the essence of eggcornhood.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2018-04-28 10:23:20)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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FWIW, David, your assertion about the simplistic nature of dictionary definitions makes sense to me, as does this stuff:
...I was thinking not of how the word arose historically, but of how it is structured in the mind of a modern speaker, someone like you or me who encounters the word gnarled and tries to understand it or reason it out. Yes, figuring that “it must be formed [in such and such a way]†is what is meant by back-formation. This particular back-formation happens thousands if not millions of times (discounting the millions of speakers who never encounter and thus never use the word), and for most of these speaker-analysts knar presumably does not enter into the picture (until they look it up in an etymological dictionary). But blending or incipient morpheme-formation (orthographic gn meaning some kind of pressure and/or twisting, perhaps) may well do so.
I do find it useful and sometimes important to distinguish between the historical and personal (and in-between) levels of language evolution, so thanks for clarifying what you were referring to.
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