Eggcorn Forum

DT—Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your “Unitas States” examples. If so, please just say so. I’ll try to keep this short so that I don’t bother with a long post that addresses something you never intended. But if you mean that we should accept “Unitas States” as an eggcorn if we could somehow have access to the background narrative, then I think you’re dealing with a different interpretation of eggcorn than I am—and a different one than I think most of us are employing on a day-to-day basis on this site.

I would call “Unitas States” a malaprop even if I knew the larger story. I think lots of people who use malaprops most of us would consider malaprops would be willing to defend them with explanations that clarify why they think the malaprops make sense. But the existence of those private narratives doesn’t make them eggcorns. For me, a word/phrase can qualify as an eggcorn only if the way it might make sense for the eggcorner is fairly clear (that “fairly” may be very important) to a person who knows the standard phrase. “Unitas States” doesn’t make much sense to me as a name for the United States—not in the same way that “eggcorn” makes sense to me as a substitution for “acorn.” When I first saw the word “eggcorn,” I knew immediately what the Language Log people saw in the term, even before I got to their explanation. And that immediacy is part of what I found so extraordinary about the word and the larger category named for it.

I ‘ve long thought that the eggcorn category is a bit weirdly artificial in that (in my view) it necessarily demands a degree of compositionality that we don’t demand from all standard phrases in the language.

At the beginning of this whole process, I said that I thought that the word “eggcorn” needed to defined from the perspective of the “eggcornista,” and not from the perspective of the “eggcorner.” I said that because I can’t see an easy way of separating malaprops from eggcorns if all arguments for the “logic” of a reshaping are equally valid if they’re actually held by the persons using the reshaping. Private narratives for the meanings of words can be hedged about with too few constraints. I’ve got more to say on this, but let’s see how you respond before I go on.

Let me shift to a different topic from this thread—nuclear eggcorns. Again, I may be misunderstanding you. When you wrote

Seriously, if cue/queue is an eggcorn, then it’s back to the drawing boards for me.

did you mean that you can’t accept that queue is an eggcorn for cue in any circumstance anywhere, or just in the types of examples that the Database provides? If I understand Kem’s second paragraph in his last post (I’m not sure I do), then I think he’s right—nuclear eggcorns don’t necessarily torpedo your formulations. The immediate context of a word like “queue” makes all the difference. I think that the first 3 Database examples for cue>>queue are pretty darn questionable, but the last two seem at least to have eggcorn potential (even if it’s not absolutely clearly eggcorn). They both use “on queue”—as if someone is standing in a queue, and they advance right on cue when they get to the head of the line. But I need “cue” to be part of the “on cue” phrase before it starts seeming more eggcornish. Flair>>flare seems to me even more doubtful as an eggcorn, but I wish the Database entry at least made it explicit that only examples of “flare” that were followed by “for” were admissible.

I feel that every Database entry should include an analysis of the substitution, but, well, I also think we need to reform the healthcare system in the US and be willing to raise our own taxes to the degree necessary to do it—I’m clearly nuts.

[Later edit: Thinking in the shower about the quest for a true nuclear eggcorn and words like “queue” and “flare” that seem ultimately part of a phrase, I started wondering whether there were non-compound words in the Database that are everywhere substitutable for their original. Does aisle>>isle work? The spelling problem has always worried me a bit with that one, but I’m too sleepy to think about it further. But again, that wouldn’t trouble your criteria as currently constituted, would it?]

Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-06-30 06:30:30)

It seems to me that the very best eggcorns also have an unknowing/unwitting punnishness or wordplay about them.

David writes:

“diffuse/defuse is different, for me, from the others you cite. Whether or not diffuse is simplex, de-fuse certainly is not.”

I think the question we were pursuing is whether the B/Y on the eggcorn side of your diagram should be greyed out. The question, that is, whether eggcorns are invariably bound in idiomatic phrasings. The eggcorn in this case is “diffuse,” the eggcorned is “defuse.” I think the eggcorn, “diffuse,” may be atomic. The discussion on the eggcorn database site points to a specific phrase (“defuse the situation”), but “diffuse” can be erroneously substituted for “defuse” in most of the contexts in which “defuse” occurs. And since “diffuse” conveys a different but related imagery (thinning something out rather than removing a fuse from something), it is a genuine eggcorn, isn’t it?

Atomic (or nuclear or simplex), though, is a relative term. As I pointed out earlier in this thread, “diffuse” still has a use context, even if that use context is an unbounded list of the English sentences in which “defuse” can be meaningfully used. Such amorphous lists, however, are not very useful for corralling eggcorns. This is why, I suspect, the entry for “diffuse” in the eggcorn database lacks the “Chiefly in:” descriptor that most of the other entries have.

The situation may be even worse than Pat indicates. Have you noticed that the database entry for “eggcorn” does not have a “Chiefly in:” descriptor? Eggcorn is apparently an atomic eggcorn-it can replace “acorn” in any and all contexts. If atomic eggcorns are flounders and not eggcorns, we may be on the verge of a catastrophic semantic meltdown.

My head hurts.

Re diffuse-defuse, kem writes:

I think the question we were pursuing is whether the B/Y on the eggcorn side of your diagram should be greyed out. The question, that is, whether eggcorns are invariably bound in idiomatic phrasings. The eggcorn in this case is “diffuse,” the eggcorned is “defuse.” I think the eggcorn, “diffuse,” may be atomic. The discussion on the eggcorn database site points to a specific phrase (“defuse the situation”), but “diffuse” can be erroneously substituted for “defuse” in most of the contexts in which “defuse” occurs. And since “diffuse” conveys a different but related imagery (thinning something out rather than removing a fuse from something), it is a genuine eggcorn, isn’t it?

I guess I really need to visit the database and see how these examples are listed. I can see including “diffuse the situation” or even “diffuse A TENSE/DANGEROUS SITUATION” as an eggcorn. The whole phrase would then be the standard entity within which a part is changed. And it does indeed apply a new imagery, that of dispersing some toxic or disagreeable substance to the point of ineffectiveness, rather than removing a fuse from something explosive.

But the following for me would not be an example of that eggcorn: “they discovered a car bomb in the area, which they secured and diffused”. Here diffused is a malaprop for defused .

For me cases like “it seems the court’s delay tactics are succeeding in diffusing public pressure” are not malaprops, but straight (metaphorical) application of “diffuse” to a situation. “You can diffuse tension at work by learning about the differences among your colleagues” is a neat example in that I can see it either as a straight metaphor or as a malaprop. But none of these would qualify for me as a good eggcorn.

kem said:

Atomic (or nuclear or simplex), though, is a relative term. As I pointed out earlier in this thread, “diffuse” still has a use context, even if that use context is an unbounded list of the English sentences in which “defuse” can be meaningfully used. Such amorphous lists, however, are not very useful for corralling eggcorns. This is why, I suspect, the entry for “diffuse” in the eggcorn database lacks the “Chiefly in:” descriptor that most of the other entries have.

I think you are saying that the use context may be what makes a malaprop into an eggcorn, and it may be more than one such context, to the point of being an unbounded list. I would agree, strongly in fact. But the more such contexts, to the point of a language-wide unbounded list, the less clearly you have an eggcorn and the more nearly you have a non-eggcornish malapropism.

“Egg” is substituted for “a” only in the context of the word “eggcorn”. “Egg for a” is not the eggcorn: it is “eggcorn for acorn”. The eggcorn is complex, not atomic.

kem wrote:

I don’t mean that “eggcorn” referring to an eggcorn is an atomic eggcorn. “Eggcorn” isn’t even an eggcorn when used in that sense. I mean “eggcorn” when it is used to replace “acorn.” The word switch doesn’t seem to be idiomatically embedded.

I think we’re still not communicating. I am saying that when “eggcorn” is used to replace “acorn”, the word itself (“acorn”) is the idiomatic matrix within which a switch takes place (of “egg” for the meaningless first syllable and “corn” for the possibly meaningless second syllable).

: ”’they discovered a car bomb in the area, which they secured and diffused’. Here diffused is a malaprop for defused.” ¶ I would say that your example was an eggcorn.

I would deny it eggcorn status in that the imagery change does not make sense. I suppose it is possible that those who wrote it theought the subjects had spread the pieces of the car bomb around at such a distance from each other that they were no longer dangerous, but this seems highly unlikely.

I finally see what you are saying, David. Nilep’s post helped. My mind doesn’t extract the “corn” from “acorn.” To me the word “acorn” is a unit, and the eggcorn “eggcorn” is a double-barrelled atomic substitution. For you, the theoretical structure you bring to eggcorn behavior helps you to hear the unaccented “corn” in “acorn.”

In response to DT’s last question, Calvert Watkins in the AHD of IE Roots says no—he derives ‘corn” from IE gre-no (the e is really a schwa, the r is really syllabic, and of course there should be a hyphen at the end)—meaning “grain.” The OED says that “acorn” is related to OE “aecer,” and Watkins derives the latter from IE agro—meaning “field.”

But there’s a flaw in the ointment: CW doesn’t seem to follow the OED in its derivation of “acorn” from OE “aecer.” He derives it from IE og (macron over the o)—meaning “fruit, berry” (and related to Latin “uva” for grape, and our “uvular”). And there isn’t an indication in either entry that we should see the og and agro roots as being related.

[Later edit after a phone call: If I had a more exhaustive source to work with, it’d be interesting to see if anyone else thinks some of the roots listed above are actually related—I don’t know how much difference of opinion may be hidden here. But Watkins’ annotations are necessarily minimal.]

Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-07-04 17:56:55)

Interesting and useful meditations, there, kem.

As I see it, the category “eggcorn” is still under construction, or to say it another way, is in the middle of an unusually conscious, careful and purposeful process of conventionalization. It is largely up to us vocal members of the community, in agreement with or reaction to the pronouncements from our Academy (Pullum, Zwicky, Waigl and others) to decide what are the limits of the category.

It is an exemplar-based category: the eponym rather guarantees that. It also partakes of the bottom-up usage-based nature of categories generally, in that as other exemplars besides “eggcorn” itself are judged by most or all of us to be members in good standing, constraints on membership are reinforced or relaxed.

In my mind and perhaps others’, the question of what is the most useful category is prominent. There are lots of related things which have always fascinated me and brought me much enjoyment, but they are not like “eggcorn” in every respect, and many of them already had been usefully named (e.g. malapropisms, mondegreens, idiom blends, ...) So I like to define “eggcorn” in ways that usefully distinguish eggcorns from prime exemplars of those categories.

So, really, I’m saying it is ultimately up to us whether idiomatic embeddedness is essential for eggcorns.

you wrote, kem.

So far I’m not convinced that idiomatic embeddedness is an absolute requirement for an eggcorn, […]. In another way, though, I’m repelled by the idea, worried that we will lose some good eggcorns.

I guess I don’t see us as losing them if we were to choose not to include them in the category. I love mondegreens, malapropisms, idiom blends, etc. just as much as eggcorns, and deciding that a particular example fits better in one of those categories doesn’t mean I lose it. Anyway, on my understanding of categories, it is perfectly fine to include non-prototypical examples as belonging in their degree to a category (and often then simultaneously to other categories as well).

The ambiguity I sense in myself is a lot like the ambiguity I feel in my activities as a field naturalist. When botanists find plants with characteristics that are intermediate between two traditional species, they have to decide whether to put the new and old plants into one larger species or whether to break the species down into several subspecies. My track record with plants is not very consistent. Sometimes I side with the lumpers, sometimes with the splitters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters). On the issue of idomatic embedding, I side (for now at least) with the lumpers-I don’t want to see eggcorns broken down into non-interbreeding subtypes over this issue.

This is a good analogy. It is indeed the same kind of issue/process.

Why would they be non-interbreeding? The fact that we give something a different name doesn’t keep there from being all kinds of cross-fertilization among the categories.

[…] it seems to me that we need explain why eggcorns so often occur in the context of an idiom. There is one rather obvious explanation: idioms become vehicles for preserving the archaic words and the archaic meanings of familiar words that lend themselves to being eggcorned.

That is right on. (To my mind it doesn’t follow that therefore the idiomatic embeddedness should or shouldn’t be used as criterial for eggcornhood.)

A second explanation for the prevalence of embedding idioms concerns the problem of eggcorn discovery. When we encounter eggcorns outside an idiomatic context, especially eggcorns where the eggcorned word is not archaic or uncommon (the common substitution of “isle” for “aisle,” for example), we don’t immediately know whether we are dealing with a simple misspelling or with a real eggcorn. We have to go looking for some evidence of the alternate imagery, and, as we all know, evidence for substituted imagery is not easy to find. For both of these reasons, I think, few eggcorns have made it into the eggcorn database that are not embedded in idioms, and the scarcity of these atomic eggcorns raises questions about their validity.

Well, to me it’s more questions about the criteria those guarding the database used. These examples are certainly valid somethings . The question is whether they are valid eggcorns, and that is a matter of definition.

If I were to ask somebody why they called it an [ajl] (aisle/isle) in the supermarket and they replied because it goes is the edge of the island that the groceries are shelved on, that would make it plain to me that they indeed had different imagery. But it wouldn’t particularly make me want to call isle an eggcorn.

Clearly, to me, the prototype for the category has both embeddedness in an idiomatic setting or set of settings and clear alternative imagery (nevertheless allowing for continued usage in the idiomatic setting(s). You are for saying that of these the alternative imagery is the only criterial feature. I think there are many usages, central members of my pre-established categories of malaprops, mondegreens, etc., that exhibit that feature, and which I don’t see a need to include as eggcorns. I am for saying the combination of both features (along with standardness to some speakers) should be kept criterial. But it is a matter of definition.

(Sorry to be so long. Hope it’s not been totally incoherent :-) )

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-07-07 11:39:17)