Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
A quick Google search reveals a number of instances of people describing something as having “gone a rye” or even “gone a-rye” instead of having gone awry.
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Hello hex, and welcome to the forum. I fear this example may be no more than a spelling error as an eggcorn needs to possess some alternative imagery to support it. I’ve had a quick search to see if I could find any examples involving misunderstandings or miscalculations due to consuming too much whiskey, as they could support a bid for eggcornicity, but without success I’m afraid…
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A pity! The whiskey thought had occurred to me as well, plus I quite liked the archaic-looking hyphenation. Thanks for the welcome anyway.
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could “catcher in the rye” or “coming through the rye” feed into this?
The sense that “through the rye” is sort of lost, alone, bereft, out in the fields of grain alone and unseen?
And so if something has gone a rye, it’s strayed out into the fields by itself and will be hard to find (like a little kid lost on a corn farm)?
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Some people, like myself, spell it incorrectly on purpose. My band’s name is Gone Arye, after my last name which is Rye. Food for thought.
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Welcome to the eggcorn website kenny…
I just wanted to point out that the same construction (in this case “gone a rye”) could fall into many different categories—intentional (pun-based) reshaping, misspelling, eye dialect, malapropism, etc.—depending upon the intent of the utterer. So, if we could find a single utterer who naively reshaped the imagery, then we would claim an eggcorn usage in that instance …irrespective of intentional reshapings elsewhere.
But I’ll also add that we eggcorn hunters are sometimes masters of self-deception. I can easily convince myself of the whiskey imagery surrounding “gone a rye”—particularly if the utterer comes from a culture where rye might enter many idiomatic expressions.
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I just ran across the variant “gone rye” in Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”, not obviously intentional on his part, and found a couple others on google. While some are obviously intentional puns “Brewday gone rye” for instance, I see others that appear to be unintentional. “Hawkgirl whose birth name is Shayera Hol was an undercover detective in her home world ‘Thanagar’ before she arrived to Earth. During an accident gone rye she was transported to Earth. ” or “Imagine a lovely family canoe trip down a local river in southern Georgia gone rye due to Florida leaking crocodiles. ”
The first one is interesting because you wouldn’t actually think of an accident going awry. An accident is already a problem, so in this case “gone rye” seems more like an intensifier, like “gone wild”. Before looking up “gone rye” here, I thought maybe the imagery would be similar to “gone to seed”, or possibly having a field intended for one crop instead “going rye”.
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