Eggcorn Forum

That’s possibly the case, but in my situation it was an eggcorn.

I don’t know that we ever resolved the issue about imagery needing to be specific, but my inclination is to accept imprecise imagery under the eggcorn umbrella. There’s no reason that eggcorns cannot possess a certain degree of mistique to them because an utterer is willing to defer to an indistinct source.

In the present case, “Lehmann” is some unknown authority. (Indeed, there is no known “Murphy” in “Murphy’s Law.”) I would further point out that we use idioms every day that many of us don’t fully understand: What do we imagine when we say that someone is “playing fast and loose”? What does it mean when something is “nothing to sneeze at”? In all cases—idiom or eggcorn—we accept a meaning, but may not fully understand the literal sense of it.

To me, the central question of the “Lehmann” eggcorn is one of prevalence. Sure, people have personal eggcorns all the time, and they are fun. But, the strongest eggcorns are those that are widespread—where multiple individuals independently ascribe meaning to incorrect terms. Let’s judge the “Lehmann” eggcorn on it’s prevalence because I find the foggy imagery amusingly appropriate for an eggcorn.

I’m in partial agreement kem… I’ve pointed out in the past how my mistaking ampersand for “amber sand” would not constitute an eggcorn. However, zak seems to suggest that he envisioned some unknown authority named “Lehman.” In this case, I would give the nod to the eggcorn because the imagery is embodied in the belief that the authority exists—rather than the precise knowledge of who that authority might be. Just my opinion.

Last edited by jorkel (2007-12-18 07:29:47)

I also think Jorkel’s on the money here. People conceive of different kinds of phrases as creating meaning in different ways, so it seems reasonable to assume that eggcorns will reflect that fact. I think Kem’s right, too, in saying that “achecorn” wouldn’t be eggcornish because the phrase seems so immediately to imply something about the word – but if you know what “acorn” really means, that implication just doesn’t make any sense. Phrases named after a person are different from something like “achecorn”; we don’t demand that they make the same level of immediate sense. The second we hear or read a phrase like “Hobson’s choice” or “Maxwell’s demon” for the first time, we know instinctively that we’re probably not going to be able to divine the meaning of the phrase from that name alone. You either need to know the story behind the phrase, or you just have to have learned its conventional meaning somewhere.

I’ve been thinking about “cafe ole” (for “cafe au lait”) along these lines for quite a while now, and I’ve slowly convinced myself that it’s probably a bona fide eggcorn. (It was suggested on the forum some time ago.) It follows a well-established pattern of names for food and drink in which the modifier follows the noun (and is sometimes drawn from a foreign language): cafe royale, cafe mexicano, shrimp louie, eggs benedict. If you know a bit of French, “cafe au lait” is self-explanatory. But for most of us, there’s no obvious reason why adding brandy and sugar to black coffee makes it “royale.” Or why a poached egg on a muffin should have something to do with a “Benedict.” But the odd-but-familiar syntactic pattern tips us off that these phrases belong to a group of food/beverage terms that are conventionally opaque – we know not to ask too many questions about why their names mean what they mean. “Cafe ole” fits right in with this pattern – and it does make a bit of sense. “Ole” is a term of approbation, and no there’s no particular reason why a pleasing combo like coffee and milk shouldn’t inspire some enthusiasm. Nevertheless, it’s not terribly specific – there are many other types of coffee that seem just as worthy of evoking an “ole” from caffeine addicts. Like “cafe royale,” then, there’s something a touch random about “cafe ole.” But my main point here is that speakers seem to understand that certain types of words and phrases are less likely to make immediate sense than others. And if a potential eggcorn seems genuinely to fit into one of these types, then we need to modify the usual standards of eggcornicity a bit.

Getting back to “Lehman(n)’s terms,” this seems to be an example of a reverse eggcorn – an eggcorn in which a phrase that seems less familiar has been substituted for a more familiar one. I’m a bit surprised by it – I really didn’t think that “layman’s terms” was so uncommon. And I’m also surprised that people who aren’t familiar with “layman” know enough about German spelling conventions to come up with “Lehman’s terms.”

I didn’t find a lot of instances of “Lehman’s terms” that weren’t puns, but there definitely are a few authentic hits out there. Most of them appear to be showing up on computer/technology discussion forums. That’s probably unsurprising – the pro/layman divide is far more visible in reference to computers, etc. than it is in any other aspect of our daily lives right now. But I also wonder whether this thing isn’t getting disseminated on the computer forums specifically. Examples:

In Lehman’s terms, not computer speak, what is the differance between a Mac and a PC??
http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/answers2/fr … 204AALj61X

(Please bare in mind that I am not
really a computer man so lehman’s terms would be great.)
http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/answers2/fr … 204AALj61X

So can someone explain to me in Lehman’s terms what the biggest difference between CCFL and LED? I know about LED’s and their pros vs pretty much any other light source, but is it a show stopper when we’re talking about LCD TV’s?
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthre … 988&page=2

(Bizarrely, the form of the first citation above is being conflated with that of the second no matter what I try to do. They’re from completely different websites, but for some reason once I hit “submit,” the forum’s formatter substitutes the first URL for the second. And when I tried giving the correct URL to you here, it deleted it again. Deeply weird. I think this is the first sign that the robots are finally starting to take over. You’ll just have to trust that I’m not making the first citation up. Or google it yourself.)

Last edited by patschwieterman (2007-12-17 02:01:34)

Except that “layman’s” and “laymen’s” are pronounced almost identically.

And the key to “Lehmann’s terms” (in fact to almost all eggcorns) is that the person using the eggcorn hasn’t SEEN the proper term in question—at least, not to identify it as itself.

Kem—it’s not clear to me what you’re implying. Are you stressing the “almost” or the “identically”? In other words, do you feel that the two words aren’t very close to being identical in standard American pronunciation? Or do you feel they’re so obviously identical that the “almost” is unnecessary?

I can’t even do satire intelligibly. This is not good.

What I meant was that the “a” in man and the “e” in men are well-differentiated in my midwest accent. We push the short “e” toward the short “i” sound (yes, “pen” and “pin” sound the same to me), and that takes it farther from the New England short “e.”

Somewhere, though, I had a real point. Oh, yes. The odd syntax of the phrase “in layman’s terms.” Take the “layman” out of it: if I wrote “in __ ’s terms,” not too many words-except proper names-would complete the phrase, right? So in a person that doesn’t know the word “layman” the neural activations naturally head down the pathways that lead to a proper name. The signals could be deflected, though, if the parser picked “man” out of the compound “layman.” Perhaps, the parser might suggest, what is being said is something like “in an X person’s terms.” But “man” is singular, and there is no article, so the parser stays quiet and the signals do not deflect.

Last edited by kem (2007-12-20 23:00:26)

An interesting tool. Thanks for pointing it out, Patrick.

Before we accept the vocalizations of this tool as a standard, we must ask “whose pronunciation is it using?” I tried submitting a few words. My guess is that it is using some form of northern and eastern American English as the standard.

It would be less likely, I grant, that someone with this accent would commit the “Lehman’s terms” error. In fact, it may be impossible. Did you notice how the Carnegie tool pronounces “Lehman?” The program says that the pronunciation is “LEE-muhn.” If that is really the case in its reference dialect, a speaker of this dialect would never wander from the word “layman” to a person named “Lehman.”

I also noticed that when you feed the Carnegie software the words “pin” and “pen,” it gives two different pronunciations. Which proves that its dialect doesn’t represent my Midwest version of American standard. In sum, then, I’m still inclined to think that a large swath of American English speakers find “layman” and “laymen” eminently distinguishable.

American English is, of course, just a small segment of the eggcorn-generating Anglophone world. To broaden the coverage a little, I called up a friend who is a British actor and asked her to pronounce these two words. In her workaday dialect (what we call “Oxford English”), the two words have quite different vocalizations. In fact, she was surprised that any dialect, North American or British, would confuse these two. I don’t think she has fully come to terms with what the colonies have done to her mother tongue.

I’m in the throes of final-grading at the moment, so no long posts from me. But I did stop into the college library today and check a couple of (admittedly oldish—1960s, 1970s) pronouncing dictionaries, one from the US, one from the UK. In both cases, the pronunciation of the singular and plural forms were identical. And these weren’t flybynight dictionaries: I used Daniel Jones’ 1963 dict. for the UK, and Kenyon and Knott for the US, both standard if now-graying texts. (Nothing else was on the shelves; I’d like to look at Daniel Jones’ revised version, or at J. C. Wells or Clive Upton.) They didn’t even provide any alternative pronunciations; those words are simply homophones for most speakers on both sides of the Big Water.

It feels kinda weird to me to argue about this in a public forum. The reduction of most unstressed vowels to a schwa (that “uh” sound at the beginning of “About” or in the middle of “battEry” or at the end of “comA”) in two-syllable words in both UK and US English is generally so well-documented and regular—and so non-controversial a topic in most cases—that it feels like we’re arguing about what the capital of California is, or at least what the name of Neil Young’s first solo album is.

Pin/pen merger (where “men” is pronounced like “min,” and “pen” like “pin”) is considered a “non-standard” feature in NAm English, and you wouldn’t want a standard pronouncing dictionary to start giving you “pin” as the pronunciation of “pen.” The fact that the CMUPD didn’t have that pronunciation is a GOOD sign, not a bad one. (You won’t find it in Merriam Webster, either—for the same reasons.) And while there are plenty of Midwesterners (like Kem) and Westerners (like me) who have the pin/pen merger, we’re not typical speakers of our respective dialects. In the US, p/pm is usually associated with Southern English (notwithstanding various small pockets elsewhere).

I have no idea how most people surnamed “Lehman” pronounce their name. But when the San Francisco radio station mentions “Lehman Brothers,” they say “Lee-man”—just like the CMUPD. Also, the pronunciation of surnames is very often not so strongly dialect-bound. Members of my own immediate family say our surname differently even though we all grew up in the same house; many families, like mine, vacillate between an “original” version and an “American” version of their surnames. It’s usually more a matter of family/individual choice and convenience than geography.

Okay, so this is still long. I just hope there’s less head-exploding jargon this time.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2007-12-21 16:37:40)