Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Used search to see if this one’s been posted before. No results. Please forgive if already discussed .., it wouldn’t surprise me to learn I’ve been using search incorrectly.
Seen in the wild on Twitter: ” ... Donavan Mitchell’s patented bad start. It would behoo of him to play better if they want to win tonight …”
On On,
Paul Woodford
Paul’s Thing
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Please forgive if already discussed .., it wouldn’t surprise me to learn I’ve been using search incorrectly.
Paul, Dixon patiently posted the following several hundred times. Eventually I got it.
I suggest that before posting, people go to the second search field on the Eggcorn Database page (the field that’s labeled “Google Search”) and search for the eggcorn or other treat they’re thinking of posting, to see if it’s already been discussed here.
It’s already in the Database in the form “be who of”, and any interpretation of its eggcornicity is beyond me. I prefer the mystery of your hoo, a half cousin of woo-woo perhaps? Here’s a few more:
It may be hoo of you to check out the coolant and oil with your mechanic and see how it looks.
Shooting, owning, collecting…everything that has to do with firearms is to be “HOO” of.
Mostly because they can’t fucking say it right and it always comes out ‘be hoo of you’.
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An eggcornish reasoning for “be who of” that keeps recommending itself to me is that “who” refers to humans while “what” refers to things. If somebody had said “it would be what of you” I might have understood “it would be mechanical/unthinkingly natural of you”. So I can take “it would be who of you” to mean it would be kind, rational, humane, truthful, just, wise, foreseeing, polite, responsible and other things that only humans (as opposed to things in general, probably even as opposed to animals in most cases) can (and should) be. Being who is rising above your lower self to be somebody as opposed to something.
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Lucian Holmes (in the last comment here ) said the following, which fits pretty well and is relevant in any case:
Loosely, “to behoove” is to be morally or situationally appropriate, right? If, in a frighteningly aural world, a speaker wrote, “It would be who of us to be empathetic,” isn’t it conceivable that what the speaker envisions is that the “who” is a archetypal person? As in the chiefly moral and situational rhetoric, “Who among us will be empathetic?” It would, it follows, be that “who” among us of whom one “of us” would need to be in order to be appropriate.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-11-02 13:27:50)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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