Eggcorn Forum

And ‘jester’ for ‘gesture’ too – but despite the flamboyant mime and mummery that we might associate with jesters/fools, I have some difficulty in accepting that anyone can confuse the two – do some English speakers sound the two in the same way?

... a attic room which we didn’t ask for we complained to the rep and we got no joy also he made a jester behind my wifes back and the idiot not realising i …
www.holidaytruths.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=53595 – 91k – Cached

He repeated, “Samak ‘Kebir,” and made a jester with his outstretched hands. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, remembered my smattering of Arabic and …
www.travelagewest.com/articles.aspx?article=6393 – 47k – Cached

She then made a jester of disgust, rolling her eyes and frowning her face. She left our table and promptly returned, gently slamming her hands onto the …
www.washingtoncitypaper.com/food/restau … p?rID=1474 – 66k – Cached

I’m not sure “shoppe” is an Americanism. From what I can tell, it’s considered a “quaint” and affectedly old-fashioned spelling on both sides of the Atlantic. Google.co.uk returns 9.29 million raw hits for “shoppe,” and the OED’s earliest citation (for the “modern” use of the spelling) is from Sir John Betjeman.

Sure, we Yanks have plenty of “Ye Olde Tea Shoppes” —since we don’t have homegrown Olde Worlde charm, we have to manufacture it—but that spelling is always used as part of a name or in a way that is explicitly affected/archaizing/sarcastic/etc. I can’t recall seeing an American use it in any other context —and I edit many thousands of pages of American prose every year. I suspect that many Americans would consider it an “English” form of “shop.”
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I’m quite willing to believe that there are more stores called “shoppe” in the US than in Britain—in fact, I wouldn’t expect any other result. But statistics that imply that don’t in any way prove that the term is an Americanism. (And of course with statistics we’d have to take into account the much larger population of the US, the problems with identifying “American” sites on the Web, and then try to figure out per capita (“per business”?) use, etc.)

My sense of what “Americanism” means more or less jibes with the OED definition: “A word or phrase peculiar to, or extending from, the United States”. The “shoppe” spelling certainly isn’t peculiar to the US as the google.co.uk hits demonstrate. And I can’t find any evidence that it originated here. I guess it’s possible that the word achieved wide popularity in the US before doing so in the UK, but my (admittedly brief) attempts to bring up germane information on the Web were pretty inconclusive: no one seems to be talking about this in an authoritative way, and the further you go back in time, the harder it is to get information on the geographical source and date of a particular use of “shoppe” to line up. Someone with better access to periodical databases than I have could do a much better job on this. It would be interesting to go looking for “shoppe” in the databases for the Times of London and the New York Times—esp. in the 1930s-1950s, when the spelling seems first to have been spreading. The very spotty data I’ve pulled up so far indicate use of the spelling on both sides of the Pond from the thirties on.

But for me, the number of stores with “shoppe” in the name is fairly irrelevant here. As I pointed out in my earlier post, the typical use of “shoppe” in both the UK and US is rather strongly context-bound. People use the spelling as part of a commercial name and when they’re being funny/flip/”old-fashioned”/etc. In the latter cases, the writers usually give you a fairly obvious clue that they’re not being serious in their use of the spelling.

What’s unusual about myword’s spelling is that it seems to be a straightfaced, non-affected use of the word that’s not part of a commercial name. You may have seen Americans use it this way, but until yesterday, I hadn’t. I’ve since gone looking for straight-faced, “non-name” instances of “shoppes” (less likely to be part of a name than the singular), and I’ve found very few from any geographical source. I looked at about 500 Google hits (starting from the back end of the Google pages to avoid commercial pages as much as possible), and I only found a handful of candidates. There were about a half dozen references to “shoppes,” but all but one turned out to refer to a particular commercial development called “The Shoppes at Elmwood” or “The Shoppes at Avondale,” etc. I found just one other candidate at a website that won’t let me duplicate the part of the site I’m interested in; it’s here: http://www.girlfriendsonthego.com/featured.htm
That’s interesting, but too tiny to be proof of anything.

So then I tried googling common phrases with “shop.” “Greatest shop” gets 9840 hits webwide, but “greatest shoppe” gets a tiny 6 hits. I clicked on two, and they both seemed to be American, but then again, one of them also used the spelling “labour,” which of course is non-standard in the US. You can use the search button for that one here: http://blather.newdream.net/red/e/everyone_is_here.html
And I think that’s a clue to what’s going on with the very tiny amount of “shoppe” use by Americans—for us, British usage represents the “prestige dialect,” and these writers may very well be using what they perceive to be a better, English spelling. I suspect that the Americans using this consider it a Briticism. But there’s no widespread usage of this spelling in serious, non-name contexts in the US—or elsewhere, as far as I can tell.

So, having looked at a lot more evidence than I had yesterday, I’m even more convinced that myword’s particular use of shoppe is not an instance of an Americanism. If the use of “shoppe” in serious, non-name contexts is truly an Americanism, there should be at least thousands of hits. There aren’t. Of course, I welcome counter-evidence. I mean no disrespect toward myword at all, but I find his or her spelling of “shops” in that context very unusual.

I have more to say about Americanisms, but this is long enough. I may post more on the subject in “Slips” in the near future, rather than tying up this thread any further.