Eggcorn Forum

Welcome to the Eggcorn Website vguerra. I’m having difficulty deciding whether the usage you cite is a malapropism or an eggcorn. If a form of “waive” were intended in those sentences, then the meaning would be along the lines of “forgo.” When an utterer says someone “didn’t waiver in his belief” the intention might be “didn’t relinquish his belief” but it sounds like a bit of a stretch. One might argue that the meaning “waver” was intended and that the error is simply a misspelling.

Related eggcorns of wave/waive…

waived off for waved off by ana Contribute! 1 2006-12-16 02:06:40 by jorkel

WAVE your rights (waive) by jorkel Contribute! 2 2006-09-13 10:52:41 by Tom Neely

Last edited by jorkel (2007-07-04 17:43:18)

huevomaiztro—I found an implicit claim in your post really interesting. You imply that an eggcorn is more likely to make its way past the watchful eyes of editors than a malaprop or misspelling. I agree; I’ve thought of making use of just this idea to return to the possibility that “viscous circle” might be an eggcorn.

And I think it’s possible that eggcornish thinking may lie behind some uses of “waiver” for “waver.” But I’m absolutely not convinced that instances of “waiver” from websites that probably have editors constitute proof of eggcornicity. I’ve been tracking eggcorns for two years now all over the web, and I’ve seen misspellings galore in major newspapers, in books published by renowned publishing houses, etc. Furthermore, congressional speeches are treasure troves of misspellings, malaprops and eggcorns, and I’ve definitely spotted a few misspellings in write-ups of presidential speeches, too—though, as you say, the latter usually get corrected within a few hours because there are so many eyes looking at them. I actually don’t think the US government’s editing standards are very high for transcribed speech. And the BBC also seems to have a major problem in that regard. (As far as I can tell, the BBC is a much bigger offender than other news services, but it’s possible they’re simply publishing more transcriptions than anyone else.) I’ll admit that I’m surprised, however, that the Washington Post didn’t just edit the transcription of W’s remarks—I suspect that the AP often edits out the misspellings, etc. in government press releases.

Another relevant point here is that “waiver” for “waver” is a particularly insidious misspelling: the two words are precise homophones; “a” and “ai” are both very common ways of representing the “long a” sound in English; both words are reasonably familiar to a well-read person; and the average spellchecker can’t catch this (yet). If there’s a particular type of misspelling likely to get past a seasoned editor, this is it.

There may well be some eggcorns among all those “waivers.” But unless something in a particular passage points specifically to the “waiver” meaning, it’ll be hard to make a convincing argument that substitution of “waiver” isn’t just a misspelling.

To those who might think that anyone who had the responsibility of reviewing President Bush’s 2001 speech would have recognized the error of printing “waiver” instead of “waver” if only someone had called it to their attention, I submit these verbatim repetitions of “We will not waiver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail”:
• a speech by Rumsfeld to troops in Kyrgyzstan in April 2002: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ … usia01.htm

• a speech by Navy Secretary Gordon R. England on naming the USS New York in September 2002: http://www.navy.mil/navydata/people/sec … 020907.txt

• the DOD’s official transcript of Rumsfeld’s comments before the troops at the famous “town hall meeting” in Kuwait City in June 2002: http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/spe … eechid=255

• I could go on, but go through the Google hits for “We will not waiver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail” yourself and see what you think: http://www.google.com/search?client=saf … 8&oe=UTF-8

My point isn’t necessarily that skilled editors made this mistake, but that the perpetuation of the error is quite strong evidence that the people reviewing this error in word choice actually think “waiver” is the right word. It can’t be—it’s a noun; its verb form is “waive.” But I guess that, to make it a true eggcorn, there needs to be some plausible explanation for a learned person’s mistaking the one word for the other.

I do think that something cognitive—not simple ignorance or inattention—is going on here. Specifically, I suspect that when these folks read “We will not waiver,” they think it means “We will not release an intangible asset,” or something of that ilk. After all, the actual meaning of “waive” is along the lines of giving up, as in waiving the right to remain silent. And bureaucrats tend to verbize nouns and “noun” verbs so much that most of them can no longer tell one from the other.

So whereas the real meaning of “We will not waver” is “We will stand our ground firmly”—in other words, “We will not even shudder or quake” in a metaphorical sense—I suspect that whoever edited Bush’s, Rumsfeld’s, and England’s speeches thinks they’re literally saying “We will not yield this debating point.” Perhaps the imagery is not as distinct and pithy as is the case with “dungeon/dudgeon,” but I suspect it is related to a more legalistic, and less physical, perception of the world around us. The really odd thing here is that the metaphorical sense of “waver,” not the literal sense of “waiver,” is the more concrete.

For examples unrelated to this string of speeches:
• Check this from the New Hampshire Union Leader of April 29, 2007, where a reporter (or editor, or both) believes a source said, “We will not waiver from our position”: http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx … 71febad378

• Or see where Leon G. Billings, in an April 2005 speech to the Edmund Muskie School of Public Service said, “But Muskie would not waiver on his commitment to Social Security” (as printed on the site of the Muskie Foundation): http://www.muskiefoundation.org/billing … 41305.html

• Or where Mark Thoma said (December 28, 2005, on Economist’s View), “But monetary authorities have convinced me they will not waiver in their commitment to price stability”: http://economistsview.typepad.com/econo … ry-8109501

Interestingly, I got these by Googling “not waiver” plus “union” plus “leader,” and turned up a bunch of hits where various union leaders assert that they will not waiver: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22not+w … art=0&sa=N

All of which is consistent with my contention that people who live in worlds of legalese and contracts picture the phrase to literally mean something to do with not exercising one of their rights, while the rest of us picture the phrase to refer metaphorically to our being firmly entrenched in a battle line, unwilling to yield an inch of turf to the opposition.

More to the point, let’s consider “will not waiver/will not waver” from the standpoint of stated characteristics of true eggcorns:
• In a typical eggcorn, the writer understands the sense of the word he or she actually employs; the problem is that the use takes up the place already occupied by a different word, often part of a set phrase. [Bingo!]
• Eggcorns make some kind of sense of an obscure or opaque phrase, but malapropisms don’t. [Iffy: On the surface, “I will not waver” is neither obscure nor opaque, but if you’re mired in a legalistic mindset, “I will not waiver” is far more familiar.]
• An eggcorn is an eggcorn even if just one person utters it. (Granted, it must follow certain rules …a critical one being that it’s a naive utterance). [I’m having trouble seeing how something can be a completely naive utterance while also making sense of an obscure or opaque phrase, but I think it’s clear from the many, many examples that—except in two cases not cited above where it was clearly a play on words—many writers are completely oblivious to the distinction between “will not waver” and “will not waiver.”]
• Using a “reasonable person standard,” I guess I’d pick the eggcorns that have the widest impact on language reshaping—and that means the greatest number of people making the same alteration. [It’s interesting to me that the overwhelming majority of ghits for “don’t waiver/never waiver/will not waiver” are from content clearly developed after W’s “We will go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban” speech in 2001. I suspect that we are in fact observing an alteration of the language by this one misuse: Of the three occurrences I found before that speech, one was clearly a play on words and the other two were clearly misspellings, as “will not waver” was used elsewhere in the same documents.]
• A phrase is an eggcorn if just a single person mis-hears the original phrase and unknowingly creates new imagery which makes sense when they go to reuse it. [The same people have been using it again and again in different settings without ever recognizing that it’s the wrong word. C’mon… some intern somewhere must have called it to their attention. I can’t conjure precise imagery of what they must be thinking, but I’m sure it makes sense to them.]
• Finally: Even if another person creates the very same phrase by way of pun (or other contrived means), it does not detract from the fact that at least ONE person made it by way of an honest mistake. [Apparently, in addition to whoever wrote all those speeches (including many I didn’t link to), jorkel did.]

Last edited by huevomaiztro (2007-07-07 02:51:29)

Thanks, jorkel! I was having fun and got carried away. Glad you took it in stride.

It also occurred to me this morning that we might have a new beast here. The best eggcorns take a misunderstood image (not necessarily opaque—it’s hard to imagine how anyone could consider “acorn” to be opaque) and replace it with another image that is crystal clear once you see it from that perspective.

But as I noted above, this seems to be an instance of replacing a clear metaphor with a foggy notion. We might need a new term for this. After all, a classic eggcorn reveals cleverness in someone who isn’t very good with words, but this beast exposes the muddle-headedness of someone who is (or should be) quite well-read.

We shouldn’t demean the clever by lumping the muddle-headed in with them. Still, it’s more than a malapropism, and it isn’t quite newspeak. For lack of a better term, it’s an eggcorn, but I still would like to see a better term.

I would think that a rigorous application of that standard would remove a great number of entries from the current Eggcorn Database. For example, I’m pretty sure the usual sense of “dudgeon” would also explain every instance cited for “in high dungeon.” It just seems a little clearer in that case that the writer has an image of some poor soul in the first level of hell. But we can’t be sure that that’s what they mean any more than we can be sure of the intended meaning of a person who refuses to “waiver”: waive my right to impose my brand of justice on the world or waver in this righteous stance?

But, at any rate, here’s something to consider: You know the speech by Navy Secretary Gordon England I cited above—the one given September 7, 2002? Well, it seems that Secretary England gave the same speech about two months earlier at a Navy luncheon. Now check the July 2, 2002 transcript. In it, the error had been corrected—the July transcript says “waver,” not “waiver.” In the intervening period, it seems, someone changed it back to the wrong word.

Short of subpoenaing a member of what is perhaps the most secretive administration in our nation’s history, I don’t think we can ever really know what the person responsible for this re-revision was (or wasn’t) thinking. But it seems to me that the misspelling has been brought to the attention of whoever first wrote “waiver,” but they keep changing it back. I don’t think they think it’s a misspelling. I think they know “waiver” and “waver” are homophones, but they think “waver” is the wrong word.

After all, a “waiver” is about due process. A “waver” is someone on a parade float.

Last edited by huevomaiztro (2007-07-08 02:47:06)

I just located a discussion of “waiver” right here in the Forum (which didn’t come up when I conducted my previous search with the term “waive”):

Never Waiver by leflynn Contribute! 0 2006-03-25 09:23:20 by leflynn

Leflynn does an excellent job of presenting the situation, but no decisive conclusion was reached in that post either. (Sorry I was not aware of that post previously).
.
.
.
I tried to Google “not waiver” with “waive” to see if the two concepts would be mentioned in close proximity, but there were just 34 hits, and the two items were always separated by an ellipsis (...) effectively removing any connectedness between the two. For instance…

[PDF] 5 Self-Evaluation ReportFile Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – View as HTML
The Executive Director has the discretion to waive the payment in full of …... [2] that staff will not waiver on their enforcement of the respective law …
www.sunset.state.tx.us/79threports/tsbbe/ser.pdf – Similar pages

Dying to Preserve the Lies: September 2004I feel that he will not waiver. He’s made it very clear that he will stay …... The Senate needed to waive budget rules to consider the proposal as part of …
dyingwarriors.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_archive.html – 427k – Cached – Similar pages

[PDF] Nov05 AdvoFile Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – View as HTML
that you are on his side and that you will not waiver from …... A defendant cannot waive the unitary jury requirement:. Because the Federal Death Penalty …
dpa.ky.gov/library/advocate/pdf/2005/advocate-vol%2027-no%206-entire%20issue%20(11-2005).pdf – Similar pages

So, I haven’t been able to disclose anything new with this approach.
.
.
.
I would also note that the homophone issue arises in the mistaken usage of “faulter” for “falter” (where the concept of “fault” is implied). I just posted about these here in the Forum:

faulter for falter—eggcorn or simple misspelling? by buddhagazelle [ New posts ] Contribute! 1 Today 03:31:23 by jorkel
.
.
.
Finally, I find it curious that many of the reshapings of either “falter” or “waver” occur in the conservative cry:
“We will not falter. We will not waver. We will not tire, and we will not fail.”

Last edited by jorkel (2007-07-08 09:19:47)

There are already half a dozen threads on wave/waive but I’ve chosen the longest to bring to your attention this from the Daily Mail, not my favourite newspaper I’m bound to say:

“Katy Perry frisked at airport security as fiancé Russell Brand is waived through”

Interesting of course because security both waived its right to search Mr Brand and waved him through.