Eggcorn Forum

We’ve had bough < bow (and here ), referring to the bow of a ship. This is sort of the reverse.; referring to the bough of a tree but spelling it like the bow of a ship, or a bow and arrow or a violin bow, or an act of bowing.
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The quote is from a poetically minded blog post

These trees have seen the passage of epochs and the passage, too, of tornado-torn towns and barely shifted their thickening bows. … I passed an old tree standing right along one of the main strips. At its base was a little placard that gave the estimated age of the tree, along with speculation of what had transpired under its bows. … One old oak on the farm where I grew up was known colloquially by hunters as the “elephant oak” because it was so big its branches bowed down to the ground and resembled elephant legs. The branches were larger than most trees.

The substitution can be found elsewhere on the web. This one is notable for repeating the spelling twice as part of a poem, and then giving a sort of eggcornish motivation for it in the idea of “its branches bow[ing] down to the ground”. Of course bow in this meaning is pronounced [baʷ] (or, for some, [bæʷ]), like bough is, rather than [boʷ] like the bow-and-arrow or violin bow or hair bow are. I think a lot of us are more likely to call a tree brachiation a bough rather than a branch if it is thick and curves strongly away from the vertical, bowing down towards the ground, so to speak. This author may not be the only one who thinks of that as the etymology of the word [baʷ]. Of course the curved [boʷ] may also be tied in semantically here (as it apparently is etymologically in some degree).

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2020-09-22 14:54:06)