Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
This one seems particularly eggcornate (and just plain ornate, come to that. If you can be plain ornate).
“In the current era both sides are battling carefully in a stickey thicket
with potholes.” from a user called, delightfully, webster, on the Groklaw open source legal blog – http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?stor … 9143159212
This can only be derived from “batting on a sticky wicket”, which certainly has correspondences with the meaning I think the writer is trying to convey. It’s a (very common) British and Australian expression from cricket, where a sticky wicket means a cricket pitch that has been rained on, is muddy and difficult to play.
Batting on a sticky wicket therefore means being in a situation where things are likely to go wrong. Some definitions include an additional sense of that situation being of one’s own devising, but I’ve never been aware of that (I’m a native UK British speaker). Battling in a sticky thicket would perforce be a dangerous and painful activity, also liable to go wrong, although perhaps if you do it carefully you can get away with it.
Rupert
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Welcome Rupert, and it’s a strange one you’ve brought with you, but I like it. There are 108 unique hits for ‘sticky thicket’ but adding battling or batting yields little more. I can see no reason why over 100 thickets should have chosen ‘sticky’ as their significant adjective unless ‘sticky wicket’ has been exerting some subliminal influence but this is not, I feel, a standard eggcorn candidate. It’s something else, equally interesting, and reminds me of a classic Two Ronnies sketch set in the trenches…
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Hullo, Peter
It is very Barkeresque. (I can’t remember the Two Ronnies sketch you mention, but it occurs to me that there may be members of this august forum to whom “Four Candles” means nothing special. They should stop reading now and spend six minutes forty seconds of their life in YouTube <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCbvCRkl_4U”>immediately</a>. Some knowledge of mid-20th century British working class vernacular may help: there are key words in the sketch which have already passed out of use in the UK.)
i know what you mean about it not being a classic eggcorn. I also had a quick look in the Google corpus, and couldn’t immediately find an equivalent use to the one I quoted, which I’m sure was entirely unconscious. Most sticky thickets seemed to be planted by journalists or sub-editors in a context where some sense of punnage would be expected. It’d be interesting to know why the phrase was concocted in those cases where the readership was primarily American and thus likely to know little about these wickets of which we speak. But there’s certainly something of the eggcorn about it.
Incidentally, if there is to be a patron saint of eggcorns, Ronnie Barker stands ripe for beatification. There are plenty of examples where this or that writer could rise to his level – “Who’s on next” – but for sheer exuberant repurposing of the English vocabulary on an industrial scale, he knew no equal.
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I was ego-googling and came across this discussion of a phrase I had written. “Egg corn” What a treat! This is certainly a new phrase to me. I’m flattered to have created something that rated your attention. My next stop is going to have to be the Two Ronnies. Greetings to all. Good work here.
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