Eggcorn Forum

While doing a post in another thread (the one on “thorn in my side”) about an English idiom derived from a possible misunderstanding of a verse in the Hebrew Scriptures, I was reminded of another perverted translation. In Psalms 17:8 the King James translation has “Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings.” The Hebrew word behind “apple” is actually “little man,” and it refers to the pupil of the eye, which reflects, in miniature, the person looking at the eye. Calling the pupil a “little man” was common in many ancient languages, including Arabic, Greek and Latin. Indeed, the word “pupil” itself is thought to derive from the diminutive of the Latin word for “boy.”

So why didn’t the King James scholars translate the Hebrew clause “pupil of the eye?” They were following a Psalter tradition, centuries old, that employed the English idiom “apple of the eye” in the translation of this Psalm verse. The English idiom is extremely old, and it appears to have arisen from the roundness of the eye’s pupil. When a medieval Englishman wanted to say something was round, the handiest metaphor was to say “round as an apple.” So the round pupil of the eye was, metaphorically, the “apple” of the eye. We can see this derivation at work in a 1601 translation of a Pliny text, cited in the OED, which equates “apple” and “ball.” The sentence reads, “None have their eyes all of one color, for the bal or apple in the midst is ordinarily of another color than the white about.” (The writer seems to conflate the iris and the pupil.)

The next chapter of the story requires us to look at the meaning of the verse in Psalm 17. When the Psalmist prayed “keep me as the little man/pupil of your eye,” he was asking to be made the object of the Lord’s constant attention. So it was a small step for anyone familiar with the Psalm to begin to think of the “apple/pupil of the eye” as something cherished, and an even smaller step to apply “apple/pupil of the eye” metaphorically to anything that was cherished. English speakers began quite early (again, the history can be traced in the OED citations) to use the phrase “apple of my eye” as person or a thing that was precious to the speaker.

Now comes the imagery switch. An apple, which was a reasonable metaphor for the pupil of the eye by reason of its round shape, has been transformed into the object of desire. So we start to look at other attributes of an apple that might echo the metaphorical meaning. An apple can be desirable to look at and to taste. See, for example, the posting at the answers.com wiki about the idiom “apple of one’s eye” (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_did_the_e … come_about). The writer takes a guess about how the idiom arose:

Thus, the entities themselves or the meaning of the words “fleshy, round, red, yellow” have been joined together to define the word apple according to the nature of the object apple they stand for. Because the entities for “fleshy, red…” “seductive, lure, dangerous” also indicate to attract people’s attention to the idea or the object they attribute to at the same time. Furthermore, this explanation can also be applied to the formation of the idiom “apple of one’s eye.”

Behind this (admittedly baroque) explanation is, I suspect, a common belief that calling someone the “apple of one’s eye” means that the desirability of a fresh apple is being evoked to convey a sense of attraction. By way, then, of an idiomatic English translation of Hebrew metaphor and a subsequent reification of the English idiom, we arrive at an artificial reimaging of the English idiom in order to explain the use of the word “apple” in the idiom. Sounds a bit like an eggcorn, doesn’t it?

Last edited by kem (2008-06-07 00:12:50)