Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I saw a reference the other day to the way that “links,” a term for a golf course, derives from an Old English/Scottish word that applied to the grassy dune areas near the sea (which were, of course, the places where golf originated and which are the sort of seaside places that most modern golf course designs try to imitate). There’s an explanation of the etymology here.
Anyway, it occured to me that this may be a stealth eggcorn. Some people who use the phrase “the links” for a golf course may be thinking about the unrelated homophone that is a way of talking about how things are connected (“the links of a chain,” “a link to another web site,” and so on). The holes of a golf course are, as it were, a linked set of golfing challenges.
Some may even be thinking about the application of this connecting sense to sausages. We refer to “sausage links.” The schematic of an 18-hole course does look a bit like a bunch of strung-together sausages.
Last edited by kem (2019-05-12 21:49:12)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Surprising. Good one. I’m guilty of this one and I suspect that we are in the majority.
Last edited by David Bird (2019-05-14 13:20:54)
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I think if anybody asked me I would speculate that it is like sausage links and perhaps named for that fact. Nowadays I would trot off to look it up online, I reckon. I have a vague memory of once speculating whether some cognate of German links “left (side), obverse†might have been involved, but the notion of a “ridge†(as the article you linksed references) doesn’t seem to be connected there, at least that I can see.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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