Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
If these etymological remarks from the online American Heritage dictionary are correct, then ‘helpmeet’ is the original and ‘helpmate’ is an eggcorn dating from 1715:
The existence of the synonyms helpmeet and helpmate is the result of an error compounded. God’s promise to Adam in Genesis 2:18, as rendered in the King James version of the Bible (1611), was to give him “an help [helper] meet [fit or suitable] for him.†The poet John Dryden’s 1673 use of the phrase “help-meet for man,†with a hyphen between help and meet, was one step on the way toward the establishment of the phrase “help meet†as an independent word. Another was the use of “help meet†without “for man†to mean a suitable helper, usually a spouse, as Eve had been to Adam. Despite such usages, helpmeet was not usually thought of as a word in its own right until the 19th century. Nonetheless, the phrase “help meet†probably played a role in the creation of helpmate, from help and mate, first recorded in 1715.
‘Helpmate’ is now the more common of the two (518k vs. 144k).
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An old one. Hard to believe that no one had bothered to mention this one before. Thanks for reminding us.
We should have a special class for eggcorns that are more popular than their acorns. Fabergé eggcorns?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Kem strikes again!
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I think the reason lots of well-known “folk etymologies” like this haven’t been mentioned is that in the olden days the point of the forum was to collect potential contributions for the Database—and the gatekeepers didn’t usually accept items that were standard fare in dictionaries.
Maybe we should start a thread for folk etymologies under Eggcornology. You can easily and quickly find hundreds of them using the advanced search functions at the OED.
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