Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
I’m new to this site, and maybe this post falls under the category of trying to locate the boundaries of what an eggcorn is.
A review on Amazon.com contains the following sentence:
The seeming burden of Brian’s book is to explain that a wholistic synthesis can be made of the great expanse of Christian tradition- not just within confessional or “Evangelical” Christianity, but across all self identifying Christianity if we are generous enough in our theological- or better, missional-theological- deliberation.
Is this an eggcorn? Or just an often-repeated mistake that has now become semi-accepted? Or a word that many good editors would leave as is?
(I just checked Webster’s 3rd Int. Dict, and “wholistic” is listed with the instruction to see HOLISTIC.)
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I also noticed this. No one has picked this up in a year? English is not my native language and when I saw the term “wholistic” with the proper context of holistic, I instantly thought it was an eggcorn. Yet google shows that word is used extensively. I guess it’s not even “nearly mainstream” anymore, but just mainstream.
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“Wholistic” is neither an eggcorn nor a mistake. It’s a “calque”—a transfer from one language to another of the same meaning. The Greek word for “whole” is “holos”; it is kinda cool that the Greek and English words resemble each other. Judging just from the OED entry (my etymological dictionary has gone missing), it’s not clear that they’re etymological cousins.
Both words first arose in fairly technical and academic circumstances in the first half of the 20th C, so I doubt that “wholism” was simply an error for “holism” at first—it probably arose as a self-consciously “nativized” variant. Now of course both are standard and in the dictionaries.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2007-05-20 14:53:56)
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