Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Although “row—> road” is in our Database as “tough road (row) to hoe”, the eggcorn cited here is not. Google gives 168K hits for “skid road”, and 3 million for “skid row”. I’ve often heard this eggcorn in conversation. Guess not too many of us grow vegetables any more!
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Woops! Gotta reply to my own post. In “tough row to hoe” we are talking about a planted crop row; in “skid row” I thought we might be talking about a row of houses, presumably in a poor part of town…. but I was wrong! Look at this:
“Skid Row
This term for a run-down area of a town where the unemployed, vagrants, alcoholics, tend to congregate is American in origin, dating to about 1931.
It comes from an older term, skid road, referring to a logging road paved with tree trunks, or skids. This usage dates to around 1880. An area of a town where loggers hung out was usually a rough neighborhood and/or the red-light district, a place where vagrants and bums could also be found in numbers.
It is often claimed that the original skid row was in Seattle. The available evidence, however, does not support this claim. The earliest known use of skid road is from the Adirondack region of New York.
(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)”
From: http://www.wordorigins.org/wordors.htm
So, if the above is valid, my guess was wrong! “skid row” is actually an eggcorn of “skid road”, even though “skid row” is now much more widely used. Tricky are words & their history.
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I’m from Seattle, and the Seattle history I’m familiar with has “skid road” as the original term. I might have gotten this from a book called Skid Road, An Informal Portrait of Seattle, which I believe I read many years ago.
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Very interesting, thanks. This may be worth an entry as “not an eggcorn”.
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But actually, skid ROW, though it’s now the accepted use, IS an eggcorn. The eggcorn replaced the original.
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Now just thinking… if it started as “skid road,” and the eggcorn “skid row” replaced it, and now someone hearing “skid row” thinks it’s “skid road” without knowing of the original source, it’s an eggcorn to them. An eggcorn that has come full circle back to the original. So what is it? A double-eggcorn? Meta-eggcorn? An anti-eggcorn? A mobius eggcorn perhaps?
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...a double-reverse eggcorn…
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