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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I had collected several examples of this substitution over the years (several in published materials) and I still do not know what to make of it.
Obama Sesame — The gaping yaw of discretion shown by Obama after high-level meetings with sitting presidents.
an image of the gaping yaw of the baby’s mouth
Louder and louder, the din grew, bouncing off the towering walls, filling the vast, gaping yaw of a workspace.
the stoker used to get hot shovelling coal into the huge, gaping yaw of the furnace.
This huge, gaping yaw of cushiony comfort is a unique phenomenon in the development of skiing. It’s a four-buckle, overlapping shell design that combines the …
I get overtones of a gaping maw, a gap (yawning or not), the extreme aperture of your mouth when you yawn, and so forth. ajaw < ajar is also relevant.
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I am used to yaw as meaning rotation around a vertical axis (i.e. turning NSEW rather than heading up/down or tipping side-to-side) It seems that the language may be changing here, however with yaw adopting a new meaning. The thesaurus.plus site contains this: “Gape is a synonym for yaw. You can use “Gape” instead a verb “Yaw”. †Another online dictionary gives “be wide open†as a definition. Of course the examples above use the word as a noun rather than a verb, but it fits this idea: a state of being wide open. Influence from yawn seems likely enough; perhaps yawn could be taken as a passive-participial form of this verb (like seen from see or born(e) from bear)?
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Have any of the rest of you run into this?
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2020-09-04 13:24:54)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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A curious mixture indeed, David. I half expected ‘yawning gape’ rather than gap in your title, which would have provided a near-complete phonetic anagram which my ear seemed to yearn for.
Yaw I rarely encounter except in a nautical setting. I’ve always imagined it as related to yacht, which the Online Etymological Dictionary suggests is derived from:
1550s, yeaghe “a light, fast-sailing ship,” from Norwegian jaght or early Dutch jaght, both from Middle Low German jacht, shortened form of jachtschip “fast pirate ship,” literally “ship for chasing,” from jacht “chase,” from jagen “to chase, hunt,” from Old High German jagon, from Proto-Germanic *yago-, from PIE root *yek- (2) “to hunt” (source also of Hittite ekt- “hunting net”).
‘Yaw’ itself is “perhaps ultimately from Old Norse jaga, Old Danish jæge “to drive, chase,” from Middle Low German jagen (see yacht).” In nature the chase, the hunt, usually ends with the prey caught in the jaws of the predator, which most Germanic tongues would pronounce as yaws. Yawning is one of the things you can do with your yaw, perhaps.
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The OED recognizes a verb with this meaning:
1. intransitive. To be wide open; to yawn.Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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So it might well be a nominalizing development of a survivor from centuries ago. OK, then.
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That last example makes me think of the verb yawp , which we had not mentioned. Is it derived from this notion of opening into a gap also? Like squawk , it feels vaguely onomatopoeic to me.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2020-09-22 12:05:08)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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