Eggcorn Forum

I’m surprised I didn’t comment on this when Joe first posted it. When I was a kid, I was convinced that “fairinheight” was a fair and accurate way of measuring the height of the mercury in the thermometer. The conviction was so strong that it cost me victory in a spelling bee I was sure was in the bag. Scars, man, scars. The Google results suggest a few others share that belief.

Fahrenheight? Here in Canada we measure temps in degrees Sauciest.

Yeah, I was actually thinking of jorkel’s mentioning of the mercury as well as yours. Again, I don’t doubt at all that many do/did have the height of the mercury in mind. I was just suggesting that understanding “height” instead of -heit works without that too. And of course both might be in mind at the same time.

I wrote a paper once on contrary scales, like when someone asks you to turn the airconditioner down and you don’t know whether they are too hot or too cold. Or when one person (overwhelmingly the wife, in my and my friends’ experience) wants something left near the front of the truck so you can get at it, and another unthinkingly says, “don’t you mean the back?” What’s up, what’s down, who’s back from the front?

Kevin has company, rogerthat. 1000 ghits (200 unique) for “degrees Calvin.”

One of the more paradoxical associations between metrics and orientation is the connection between up and “higher” pitches. It is culturally conditioned. Levitin, in This is Your Brain on Music, points out that for the Greeks a higher pitch was usually associated with a down direction (as it still is on a guitar). There have been attempts to establish the association between up and shorter sound wavelengths as a natural law, but they all end up as forms of special pleading. Think about this the next time you see a choral conductor jabbing at the ceiling to pull the soprano section out of a flat note-it is simply a convention, with no more natural authenticity than the antic signals of a third base coach. North at the top of the map and the notes climbing off the top of the treble clef on a score of the Ninth Symphony are both markers of modern Western culture.

Last edited by kem (2012-04-06 12:30:42)

kem wrote:

One of the more paradoxical associations between metrics and orientation is the connection between up and “higher” pitches. It is culturally conditioned. Levitin, in This is Your Brain on Music, points out that for the Greeks a higher pitch was usually associated with a down direction (as it still is on a guitar). There have been attempts to establish the association between up and shorter sound wavelengths as a natural law, but they all end up as forms of special pleading. Think about this the next time you see a choral conductor reaching toward the ceiling to pull the soprano section out of a flat note-it is simply a convention, with no more natural authenticity than the antic signals of a third base coach. North at the top of the map and the notes climbing off the top of the treble clef on a score of the Ninth Symphony are both markers of modern Western culture.

I think that’s an overstatement, though I don’t know enough to speak with great authority here. I know a lot of cultures think of short-wavelength sounds as high and long-wavelength sounds as low. A lot also use a thin-thick distinction; the short-wavelength sounds are, I believe, always the thin ones. Would you have guessed differently? Cf also our own “sharp” vs. “flat” — be interesting to see if there are any cultures that would do it backwards.

There are a number of very natural associations that tend in the direction of associating up and down in this way. This kind of thing is always culturally conditioned or (I’d rather say) culturally molded, but that does not make it purely arbitrary or simply conventional. It’s like a rooster’s cry being kokoriko in Japanese, kikiriki in Spanish, cockadoodledoo in English, or the letter sounded m being named em in English, eme in Spanish, mem in Hebrew, mu in Greek: you have to know your culture’s convention for the thing, but it is not a totally arbitrary thing, but rather there is a natural (not inevitable) connection there for the cultures to mold.

Look at what people do with their throats and necks when they’re trying to hit a high note vs. a low one. Try to do it backwards.

Birds’ sounds are generally high in pitch; animals with low-pitched sounds are usually to be looked for lower down.

High-pitched sounds affect our ears most saliently. Low sounds, especially very low ones, can reverberate in our guts.

Low pitch is associated particularly with depth, and with hollow, reverberating containers or cavities, which are rarely found upwards from us.

Anyway, it would interesting to see some world-wide statistics showing how many cultures would associate the fast-frequency sounds with height vs. lowness/depth, and vice versa. I’ll bet the distribution is skewed towards the arrangement we’re used to. (Such things are pretty hard to measure. Cultures often will have different things that can be interpreted in different ways; witness the placement of guitar strings that you mentioned for our culture. I’ve seen Nahuatl cited in support of enough supposed linguistic patterns that it does not support, that I’ve gotten pretty skeptical about claims. But still, it ought to be possible to do right. Anybody in the mood to do an ethnomusicological dissertation?)

kem, what are the Greek words used for pitch?

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-08-16 21:13:54)

I probably had better get over to the soapbox to talk about this, but you’re scratching right on top of a very itchy place, kem! Essentially, people assume a dichotomy between exceptionless, totally predictive natural law and what is purely arbitrary, conventional, culturally imposed. The reality is that there is a vast stretch of what is reasonable in some degree but not inevitable, motivated but not predetermined, in between those two endpoints. Most of language lies there. Including, most definitely, the metaphorical/metonymical choices we make in this sort of quasi-synaesthetic amalgams.

Thanks for validating my eggcorn Pat. Very compelling tale of logic being dashed by the vagaries of reality —at the conclusion of a spelling bee no less!

The word “temperature” was part of English (and Latin) long before thermometers were common. “Temperature” (and the related “temperament”) referred to the balance of the four humors in a person. The theory of temperaments and humors is old, going back at least to the Greek classical period (notably Hippocrates), but probably borrowed by the Greeks from earlier sources. The Wikipedia article on “humorism” will give you some background on this ancient psychological and medical doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism).

The qualities of hot and cold played a role in defining the four humors. I’m not sure when the word “temperature” began to restrict itself to the ratio of hot and cold in the balance of the humors. It seems likely that the increasing popularity of devices that measured hot and cold had something to do with co-opting “temperature” to describe what thermometers measured rather than the balance of the humors in one’s temperament.

There were devices in the classical period that were capable of measuring heat, and they measured it with a rising and falling column of water. As far as I know, however, Hippocrates did not use an analogy with these instruments to describe the proportions of heat to the four humors. His metaphors had more to do with the “prevailing” and the “mixture” of the various humors (See some of Hippocrates’s discussion of humors at http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/ancimed.mb.txt). While “rising” and “falling” could have been invoked at any time as metaphors for the influence of heat on the humors, chances are good that these metaphors hitched a ride on the popularity of vertically oriented heat measuring devices.

Most of the thermometers in my house have digital displays. Will the replacement of the mercury column thermometer undercut “rising” and “falling” as metaphors for temperature changes?

Last edited by kem (2008-08-21 00:53:11)

Yeah, and we still speak of “dialling” a phone number (at least I do, although I may be old-fashioned) although buttons replaced dials for most of us a long time ago.

My wife and I had the same conversation this week. I suggested she look in the front compartment of my backpack for something, and she immediately started looking in the back. We got it straightened out, eventually.

An interesting thing happened in the early days of graphic interfaces. We have this pervasive (and naturally motivated, though not absolute) MORE is UP metaphor, so an up-arrow often corresponds to a “higher” number. However, there is also the strongly-established LATER is DOWN THE PAGE convention: if you list points in a topic, for instance, 1 is at the top of the page, 2 and 3 further DOWN. For a while, in some programs, an up-arrow meant MORE for a dollar amount, but earlier (=LESS) for a date or time. All you could do was negotiate with the program: press an arrow and see what happened, then act accordingly. Much as you do in the human-human communication situation.

Gaining vs. losing an hour when daylight-savings time begins or ends is another fun one engendering almost endless confusion. When you gain an hour you have lost an hour out of your day, when you fall back you are actually ahead one hour in one conventional way of speaking. You often have to fall back on saying, “If your clock says two o’clock, set it to three”, or verce visa.

TootsNYC, I can remember seeing that as a kid (see below/above) and taking it quite literally! It bothered me if it was on a previous or following page rather than place above below the reference on the same page.

I grew up in Michigan, where we have a lower and upper peninsula. When my family went on vacation, we usually went “up north.” Later, I had an acquaintance who would often refer to a town north of where we lived and say “I’m going to run down to [name of town],” and it very much threw me. I would say, “You mean ‘up,’” but the entire time I knew him, he continued to use that expression. (I always sort of wondered if he used “down” because the town was considerably smaller than ours.) So at least to an extent, it would seem that north as up and south as down are conditioned rather than somehow inherent.

Last edited by JonW719 (2008-08-25 17:22:18)

I like “foreign height.” The word “Fahrenheit” is, for many school children, their earliest encounter with long, strange, un-English words.