Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Really surprised that this one seemingly hasn’t been mentioned here before. Watching an old Seinfeld episode a few hours ago, I heard Jerry refer to Kramer’s arm, which had been bitten, as “gnarled”. The search term “gnarled on” yields a number of hits, such as:
She came back carrying an obviously gnarled on bone.
fan fiction
We buried the beer in a snowbank, gnarled on some cold chicken and toasting the brown liquor.
travel account
One hedgehog gnarled on the unleaded hose.
hedgehog apocalypse
They bit the hand that fed them. Actually, they gnarled on it until it was a bloody stump.
geek discussion
I have never been served such sparse lamb chops in any fine restaurant. They looked like they had already been gnarled on by a dog.
restaurant review
To this day I don’t know if it was a gecko, a squirrel or a rat who not only gnarled on my soap, but also ate my contraceptive, and destroyed my argan oil spray.
memoirs
I think we can call it an eggcorn, if we can accept “Things that get gnawed can look gnarly as a result” as a plausible meaning connection.
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Gnarled looks like it must be formed from a verb to gnarl , and chewing ―masticating so as to disturb the even distribution of any layers or strata in the gnarled object― is a more than reasonable meaning for that verb to have. It would be a specific case of the more general meaning you might find in a dictionary: “to twist into [or at least towards] a knotted or distorted form.â€
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I like it.
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The likelihood of some sort of blending ( gnawing and gnashing with snarling , perhaps?) adds to the beauty of it.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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DavidTuggy wrote:
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.
Actually, gnarl is a back-formation from the earlier gnarled, and the blending you mention doesn’t seem to have been involved. Here’s the entry from the Online Etymological Dictionary:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/gnarled
And here’s the entry on gnaw:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/gnaw
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(See an overlong response to this in the Eggcornology thread: here )
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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