Eggcorn Forum

I just came across juice harp for the first time and was thinking of posting this myself. I think juice harp is clearly an eggcorn, as I think it’s pretty recent and the imagery could be of spittle, etc.
Jaws harp, if more recent, is clearly an eggcorn with very obvious imagery behind it. In the speculation about the etymology some suggest this was the original, and that jew’s harp came from that – which would possibly be an eggcorn if the new imagery imagined some ethnic origin for the instrument.

If it comes from the French “jeu-trompe,” or toy trumpet, then all three could be eggcorns… but even if not, I think there’s clearly at least one eggcorn and quite possibly two. This is a fine example of how eggcorns become mainstream and accepted usage.

“juice harp” or “jaw harp” for “jew’s harp” is one that I myself have been confused about in the past. I searched for it on this site and got an interesting thread from quite awhile back, which I thought I’d resurrect now for the benefit of those who, like me, hadn’t seen it before. The etymology is interesting and a bit mysterious, and it seems that there are at least a couple of eggcorns involved.

Dixon

David Tuggy wrote:

Perhaps if, having learned the euphemism, the kid hears someone else pronounce it in the traditional way and doesn’t recognize that it is any different from what he’d learned, you have some sort of a borderline eggcorn, but not a clear case of one.

Well, I can almost give firsthand evidence here. When I was a kid, the people a couple of doors down had a music store that went out of business. They held a huge yard sale to get rid of the small items that were left over, and I remember being shocked by seeing a hand-written sign that said “Jew’s harps.” I figured that it had to be either a mistake or some perversion of “jaw harp” that someone had invented to insult Jews. (Jaw harps obviously seemed to me like a big comedown from regular harps.) For my memory to make any sense, I must already have been familiar with the phrase “jaw harp.”

But here’s my point: isn’t it possible that the euphemistic impulse can be so strong that people assume the non-euphemism must be an error? And in such a case, could one rule out eggcornicity? I admit that my argument would be stronger if it weren’t so likely that I already knew “jaw harp” at that time—we tend to assume that the first version of a word that we run across is the “right” one. But I’m not sure that point’s fatal.

Well, a folk-etymology of a foreign word isn’t necessarily an eggcorn either. It could well be a kind of joke or wordplay, a knowing recognition that this is a foreign word whose composition I don’t know but which sounds sort of like X, so I say X. This can then catch on and become standard in the borrowing language.
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Here in Mexico there are quite a few place names of that sort. The Nahuatl name Cuauhnahuac (pronounced [kʷaw̥ˈnavak], though maybe the v was a w sound) means nothing but “particular place name” in Spanish, but it sounds sort of like “cuerno” ‘horn’ and “vaca” ‘cow’, and the name is now “Cuernavaca”. I doubt that anybody hearing Cuauhnahuac really thought the Nahuatl-speaker had said “cuerno de vaca”, and the first person to say “cuerno de vaca” quite certainly did so knowingly, but the folk-etymology could catch on just fine under those circumstances. And anyone who had heard it pronounced “cuerno de vaca” or in fast speech “cuernavaca”, and repeated it thinking it was the proper form, would also not be committing an eggcorn.

There’s also the possibility, which Pat mentioned, of not euphemism but dysphemism, choosing to say “Jew’s harp” to insult or poke fun at the Jews, or of having some other connection to the Jews in mind and choosing consciously to say “Jew’s harp” because of it.

You can’t say “It can’t be chalked up to euphemism, ergo it’s an eggcorn.”

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-12-01 09:49:02)

They are not mutually exclusive across a population, but they (or at least euphemism and dysphemism) can avoid being mutually exclusive in an individual only if he’s schizo or at least pretty muddled. If he knows that the standard term is Jew’s harp and chooses to say jaw harp or juice harp, he is not laying an eggcorn. If someone else hears him say jaw harp or juice harp and repeats it, that person is not laying an eggcorn either. When there is euphemistic (or dysphemistic) motivation for saying something a certain way, shared by a large population, many may choose to use the euphemism consistently, which will then become standard in their circles without necessarily ever having been an eggcorn for anyone.

fwiw, if you add in variants with jews and jews’ and jew you get another 100K hits or so.

Juice harp seems more susceptible to eggcorning for me than jaw harp in any case; the phonological difference between the (stressed) [u] or [ʲu] of “Jew” and the [ɔ] of “jaw” is within my punning range but not my mistaking range.

In #5 above, David Tuggy wrote of “jaw harp” and “juice harp”

The eggcornosity of these things, especially in recent usage, is somewhat doubtful. If they are in fact euphemisms, purposely used to avoid what will otherwise sound like an ethnic slur, they are not eggcorns. And if a kid learns such a form from a euphemizing adult, you still don’t have an eggcorn.

While I don’t think I disagree with any of DT’s statements in #8 and later, I believe “jaw harp” or “juice harp” could have arisen from “jew’s harp” (if that’s really the etymon) in a way that would make them eggcorns. If a speaker decides that the standard form of a word just can’t be right—for whatever reason—and then erroneously substitutes some similar-sounding word that works in context, you’ve got an eggcorn. We’ve talked about similar situations before—“Parthian shot” comes to mind.

The first citation of the phrase “parting shot” shows up some years before the first one for “Parthian shot,” but some dictionaries have explained “parting shot” as the “corruption” because the military tactic of seeming to retreat and then turning and delivering another shot was famously associated with the ancient Parthians. But given the respective dates of first citation and the fact that “parting shot” really isn’t very opaque, it seems at least as likely (more likely, I’d say) that the first person to have used “Parthian shot” may have been making an erroneous assumption about the origin of the phrase—an erroneous assumption that was then repeated and enshrined by lexicographers.

If the substitution of “Parthian shot” for “parting shot” was driven by a sincere belief that the earlier form was wrong, then I’d say that “Parthian shot” is an eggcorn. I’ve occasionally used the term “reverse eggcorns” to refer to these kinds of reshapings because they seem often to be motivated by the speaker’s mistaken belief that other people are mistakenly using an eggcorn. “Parthian shot” sounds pretty different from “parting shot,” and I think that “reverse eggcorns” can display a more radical reshaping of the acorn than eggcorns arrived at by different pathways—the eggcorner’s strong conviction that s/he must be right bridges the phonological gap between the two forms. Also, as here, REs can involve the substitution of a far less common word for a more common one. (Another way in which they’re “reverse” in comparion to many other eggcorns.)

A while ago, I noted that users of the eggcorn “thai dye” sometimes seem to be perfectly aware of the standard phrase “tie dye,” but they reject it as an error. I think that “thai dye,” too, is a reverse eggcorn.

And the word “penthouse” from “pentice” has always seemed to me a similar-looking case. I don’t think that “pentice” would have sounded much like “pentice” in late 16th C English, when the modern form first appears.* But apparently, some speakers assumed that “pentice” was a degraded form of “penthouse,” perhaps envisioning the same sort of phonological process that turned “Durham” into “Dur-um.” And since a penthouse can in fact be someone’s home, it works. (This case is a bit different from the “thai dye” and “Parthian shot,” however, because “pentice” couldn’t be seen as an eggcorn of “penthouse.”)

If you run into “Jew’s harp” and feel that it’s so insulting and absurd that it must be wrong, “juice harp” and “jaw harp” might be reasonable guesses about what the original, non-dysphemistic form must have looked like. In that case, I’d say they’re eggcorns.

Did “juice harp” and “jaw harp” arise in this way? I haven’t a clue. No one else knows, either.

*I’m leaving out the fact that “pentthouse” shows up in an Anglo-Norman text as an apparent borrowing from English centuries before it’s first cited in an English-language environment; ultimately, that doesn’t seem to affect my basic point here.

Just before this falls off the bottom of the page again, as an ex-Jew’s harp player I feel I must point out that after twangling away for even a few minutes one’s gob, or mine at least, becomes bone dry and demands lubrication, putting paid, I hope, to notions that juice has anything to do with salivation. As a youth who was appalled, (and as an adult is no less so,) by the Jew’s Ear fungus, whose Latin tag solemnizes the calumny, I have to say I never felt there was any hint of slur in Jew’s harp. I think I thought, and I think I would still think if I hadn’t become so self-conscious about it, that the term was descriptive of a particular Hebrew shape for a harp, as opposed to the shape of an Irish for example (or Welsh) harp.
I’d wondered why so little attention had been paid to “gewgaw” references until I realised – just this week – that dictionaries insist it’s pronounced “goo-gore”. I’ve been familiar with the word since childhood but can’t really remember anyone actually saying it and for some reason have always thought of it as “jew-jaw”. I still can’t really believe it – ‘goo-gore’ sounds like a Cockney pronunciation of ‘Google’ for goodness sake!
I”d felt sure that ‘gewgaws’ fell in with gimcrack gems rather than gaudy articles of glass and as I can’t be uniquely stupid (surely that can’t be geordie articles?) it may well be that many others have made the same mistake. If so, both ‘jew’ and ‘jaw’ reside in this ancient word, which has long been intimately associated with this fascinating instrument, and may account more fully for some of its written and spoken manifestations.

Here’s another difficult case: is chew him down a euphemism or a bonified eggcorn? These first person accounts suggest the latter, for them at least.

Regional differences So I said, “You know, some people find that phrase offensive.” She asked why and I said because of the stereotype that all Jews are cheap and therefore being a tough negotiator is acting like a Jew.”
She looked at me odd and then said, “It’s chew them down. Like you chew on them until they give you a good price.” She made the appropriate chewing gestures with her hands to further make her points.
“No,” I said, “it’s Jew them down and you probably don’t want to say it again.”
She also thought it was a chews harp because you put it in your mouth.

Andrew Sullivan eggcorns blog Someone said “Jew him down” around me when I was 15 and working in an antique store one summer. But I heard “chew him down.” I figured it meant when you talk someone into giving you a lower price one something, when you haggle, your jaw is moving up and down. You’re chewing down the price. Chewing them down. Chew him down. I didn’t have tons of cause to use the expression once I was no longer working in an antique store, but I did use it from time to time, as I like to go to junk sales and flea markets. I think I was nearly 25 when I used it in front of the right person – someone who gasped, looked me in the eye, and said, “I can’t believe you would say something like that.” I was completely mortified when she told me what I actually heard in that antique store when I was 15.