Eggcorn Forum

Suzie – I was surprised by your numbers too, so I ran them myself. I got far fewer hits for “dour situation” and “dour circumstances,” around 200 raw hits for each – which would typically translate to fewer than 100 unique hits. I have a feeling you probably didn’t put quotations around “dour situation,” etc. when you ran your google search. Without quotes, you just end up with an estimate of all the webpages containing the words “dour” and “situation,” rather places where the two words occur in sequence.

Beyond that, this one had me scratching my head a bit. Like you, I’d typically use “dire” in the places your writers used “dour.” But is “dour” wrong? I wasn’t sure, and after looking at some dictionaries, I’m still not certain. Here are the two definitions given by the OED:

1. Hard, severe, bold, stern, fierce, hardy.
1375 BARBOUR Bruce x. 170 [He] wes dour & stout. c1425 WYNTOUN Cron. VIII. xvi. 103 Dyntis dowre ware sene. 1513 DOUGLAS Æneis II. vi. [v.] 23 The dour Vlixes als, and Athamas. 1533 BELLENDEN Livy II. (1822) 166 Thir legatis wes gevin ane doure answere be Marcius. 1596 DALRYMPLE tr. Leslie’s Hist. Scot. IV. 249 He led a dour and hard lyfe. 1794 BURNS Winter Night i, Biting Boreas, fell and doure. 1848 LYTTON Harold VI. i, Tostig is a man..dour and haughty. 1891 ATKINSON Moorland Par. 261 The dour, merciless intensity of a northern moorland..storm.

2. Hard to move, stubborn, obstinate, sullen.
c1470 HENRY Wallace IV. 187 Malancoly he was of complexioun..dour in his contenance. 1513 DOUGLAS Æneis XIII. vi. 106 All our prayeris..Mycht nowder bow that dowr mannis mynd. 1572 Satir. Poems Reform. xxxviii. 76 Our men are dour men. 1816 SCOTT Old Mort. viii, ‘He’s that dour, ye might tear him to pieces, and..ne’er get a word out o’ him.’ 1854 MRS. GASKELL North & S. xvii, Thornton is as dour as a door-nail; an obstinate chap.

The second definition seems rather narrower to me, and it’s apparently fairly restricted to humans. But the first definition is applied to “dyntes” (“blows” in the context of a military battle), an answer, a life, and a storm. Some of these may be older uses that are no longer current, but the OED says nothing at all in that regard.

Since the word was originally Scottish, I hauled The Concise Scots Dictionary down off the shelf. Interestingly, the CSD addresses the animate/inanimate split explicitly. Here are the first few definitions:

1. (of persons, actions or things) determined, hard, stern, severe

2. obstinate, stubborn, unyielding,

3. (of persons) sullen, humourless, dull

4. slow, sluggish, reluctant (to do something)

5. (of the weather) bleak, gloomy

6. (of land) hard, barren

The CSD doesn’t give examples, unfortunately, but it looks like Scots usage allows a fairly wide application of “dour.” I’m not sure whether this is influencing wider usage in English or not.

Just to muddle the pond further, I found a website called “Captain Canard,” on which the good Captain offers “word mastery for the masses”; he gives a definition of a non-common word and then a few examples. This was his first example for “dour”:

The dour situation brightened after Penelope’s panties began glowing again.
http://www.captaincanard.com/words/words2.php

I don’t know whether CC knows his stuff or not.

I think “dour situation” is probably what Jorkel would call a “stealth eggcorn” – a phrase that has as its basic template another, different phrase. Like some other “stealth eggcorns,” this usage seems to involve a less common but arguably acceptable sense of a word.

Pat—you are quite right: When I wrote that I searched for dour + situation, I meant that I did not search for “dour situation” in quotation marks, but only for occurrences of the two words together on a page. I did that because the more restrictive search would not have caught constructions like this:

“As bleak and dour as a situation may be, there is always a way to flip it around and laugh about it.”
http://www.usmagazine.com/node/1628

The large number of hits of course included many that were irrelevant, but still a lot more that were relevant than I was expecting. I had no idea that “dour” used this way was so common. Sorry if the way I presented the results was misleading.

Thanks for your further investigation. It took me a long time to write up my original post because of my uncertainty over the correct usage of “dour.” I’m glad I’m not the only one who found this to be a gray (heh) area.

I found just a handful of hits for “dour straits” and 2 for “dour straights”. What a riot. Sometimes it takes an extreme example to prove a point. True, very few occurances like these exist, but still I think it’s a hilarious illustration of the mental that generate eggcorns. I agree that stealth eggcorning explains some examples, but that doesn’t preclude some coming from the more common routes.

Thanks, Pat, for the “rest of the story” concerning the origin of the word. I never knew it originally meant something so akin to “dire”. I must confess, I’ve only understood it in the more common use, such as OneLook.com defines:

adjective: harshly uninviting or formidable in manner or appearance (Example: “A dour, self-sacrificing life”)
adjective: showing a brooding ill humor (Example: “The proverbially dour New England Puritan”)

The 2nd one, especially, is how I’ve always understood the word. Which is why I find the eggcorn so humorous. The imagery is close to the original, yet so completely different!