Eggcorn Forum

“Haywall” is probably just an idiom blend, but I couldn’t resist posting it. This blidiom is the greatest thing since chopped liver. I chuckle whenever I think of it.

“AWOL,” pronounced EHY-wall, is an acronym for “Absent Without Leave.” It has a narrow technical meaning in military contexts, but it is widely used in common speech for someone who is unexpectedly missing. It sometimes occurs in the idiom “to go AWOL.” “Haywire,” probably deriving from the old habit of use baling wire to do makeshift repairs on machinery, refers to something that is confused, erratic or broken. “Haywire” mostly occurs as a component of the idiom “to go haywire.”

Over the last century “haywire” has gone from familiar to unfamiliar. On the Western U.S. ranch where I was raised we were still using wire to bale hay in the 1950s. But wire baling was already in decline in that decade, and by the 1980s twine had largely supplanted wire (Baling twine was always an important alternative to wire, but supply problems with sisal kept wire in the mix until cheap polypropylene twine arrived on the market. Today, of course, greenchopping hay into a silage wagon is probably more popular than baling.). At the same time that haywire was on the way out, the word “AWOL” was on the way in. Originally a piece of American miliary slang, “AWOL” has ridden the coattails of the U.S. military to a global presence.

The crossing fortunes of these two words has led to some confusion in modern English. People no longer know what the “haywire” in the idiom “go haywire” is. But “haywire” sounds a bit like the its semantic cousin “AWOL,” especially in non-rhotic versions of English, and both are used in idioms that include the word “go.” On the net we find almost a hundred unique examples of “haywall,” a blend of these two words. Examples:

Game forum posting: “bq. : “But perhaps only test it on a test server first of all as otherwise it would go haywall” (http://forum.travian.com/showthread.php?t=83533)

Discussion of device drivers: “All my colours(im english) have gone haywall and my mouse was disabled! HELP!!!” (http://www.driverforum.com/modem/1800.html)

ipod forum: “my iPod starting going haywall and kept crashing when i tried to play songs.” (http://forums.ilounge.com/archive/index … 69920.html)

Blog fiction: “So the concert began, and as soon as Jesse stepped out on that stage everything went haywall.” (http://www.quizilla.com/stories/4909684 … 829part-36)

I suppose “haywall” could be an eggcorn. A wall made out of hay would be something that would be flimsy and easy to penetrate, so “going haywall” might be applicable to situations where things were breaking down. It’s such an obvious blend, however, and the idea of a “hay wall” is so unfamiliar, that it is hard to make a case for it being an eggcorn. If the idioms had not existed, I doubt that “haywall” would ever have been coined.

Last edited by kem (2008-08-02 18:53:59)