Eggcorn Forum

What’s “the fabulous MWDEU ”?
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“A blessing in the skies” seems to deviate from central eggcornicity in that the meaning seems to generally be “a fabulous, unexpected blessing, a Godsend”, i.e. “a blessing from the skies”, rather than “a blessing that at first looked like a curse”.
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I too waffle on what status to accord to what starts out as a joke or other purposeful mangling but is then picked up innocently by others and used as standard. I think it happens, and may be part of the background of a number of eggcorns we’ve discussed and accepted. I’ve argued in other posts that these are not really eggcorns.
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But from another viewpoint (which I’ve also argued) an eggcorn is an eggcorn, no matter how it arose. Prototypically its origin is mondegrenous—someone hears the correct phrase and misanalyzes it—, but it need not always be so.
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And of course a given eggcorn may arise in one way for one person and in another way for another. (As you both have said, in effect.)

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-01-09 12:37:02)

kem wrote:

Both, I think, convey the idea of an unexpected boon. One drops from the sky, the other arises from the transmogrification of evil.

Yes, they have that in common with each other, and, in some degree at least, with unmodified “blessing”. But the whole point of the modification in the acorn is to specify that transmogrification of evil which the putative eggcorn ignores (if it doesn’t deny).

Probably I should have been clearer: the modification I was talking about was the phrase “in disguise”, which, when added to “blessing”, specifies very clearly that the situation that turns out to be a blessing didn’t look like one at first.

Compare the following (the first four non-repeating entries with reasonable context from googling the phrase) to the four kem originally cited:

Though the [National Intelligence Estimate] report aggravates Israel’s effort to compel Washington to pursue an increasingly harsh line against Tehran, all is not lost for Israel. In fact, despite these initial knee-jerk reactions, the NIE may very well end up being a blessing in disguise for the Jewish state by pulling Israel out of its state of paralysis vis-à-vis Iran.

Why the recession is a blessing in disguise | Alice Thomson … – [ Traducir esta página ] 10 Oct 2008 … The bankers are fleeing.

The rise of Hamas: A blessing in disguise? – International Herald … – [ Traducir esta página ] Maybe, but the participation of Hamas in the elections might prove to be a blessing in disguise. It will force the Palestinians to make a serious choice

is it a curse, or a blessing in disguise.

In every case, the situation called “a blessing in disguise” is one that, from “our” (the speaker and hearer’s) viewpoint, looks like a bad one. The NIE says Iran is not making nukes, when “we” want the world to know that it is; recessions are not what anyone, certainly not “we”, would naturally think of as “good”; “we” think it would have been better if Hamas were not participating in the elections; it looks (to “us”) like a curse, but it might turn out not to be.
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Of kem’s original four, the situation is, the first three times, good from the moment it appears: “we” suddenly got access to the Pope; those extra lives are an intrinsically positive thing and “you” will become acutely aware of their value (as “I” have) as soon as “you” run into Contra 4 on the DS; JDOM is so much easier for “us” to use than SAX or DOM. In the fourth example someone (“my” roommate?) is playing music on the stereo till all hours of the night, but being kept awake turns out to be a good thing for “me” because “I” make some interesting discoveries. (I had to look it up to learn all that.)
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“A blessing” or “a blessing (from the skies/the saints/God/the gods)” may or may not look great from the start: that aspect of it is just left unspecified (though since it is by definition a good thing there is some expectation that it will look like it). But “a blessing in disguise” is strongly specified to look at first as if it is not a good thing. All four of kem’s cited usages thus fit the meaning, “a blessing (that may well look like one but might not)”, and three of them contradict the central (criterial, if you like) specification of “a blessing in disguise”, that the blessing looks at first like a bad thing. This means that the proposed “eggcorn” is used mostly in contexts where the “acorn” does not fit.
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I suspect that this pattern would hold beyond this limited sample. That is why I am reluctant to call it a full-fledged eggcorn. It is more like a standard mondegreen, though not as ludicrous as many, and more widely useful than most of them.
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A bit of checking tends to confirm this. Think how ridiculous the following are when you take them to mean “a blessing in disguise”; their authors can’t have intended that.

Fred Astaire Morristown Dance Studio – Ballroom, Latin, Salsa … – [ Traducir esta página ] Our female staff is a blessing in the skies. They are great listeners, so you may share with them anything that is on your mind.

Us5 – A girl like you song lyrics – [ Traducir esta página ] You’re a blessing in the skies. I thank the lord to have you. Right here by my side. Refrain: Cause a girl like you. Is all I ever wanted

That it may have been born in contexts like that of kem’s fourth usage I don’t doubt, and it would be a good eggcorn if it continued to be used only in such contexts. But it often, even mostly, isn’t.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-01-09 19:11:44)

patschwieterman wrote:

I think the classic formulation would be “Who are you, and what have you done with the real David Tuggy?

I’m just me, arguing the other side with myself if I can’t find anyone else to argue it with.

He also wrote:

However, I’m surprised by this line of reasoning: ¶ “it would be a good eggcorn if it continued to be used only in such contexts. But it often, even mostly, isn’t.” ¶ So a reshaping can only be a good eggcorn if it’s used only or usually in contexts where the acorn fits? If that is your argument, I just can’t buy it. … It’s not at all unusual for a reshaping to work in the way this one does: some of the reshapings get a new meaning; some are clearly eggcorns. I don’t see why the existence of examples that aren’t eggcorns challenges the eggcornicity of ones that clearly work. Guilt by association?

I hear you. And you’re right (at least to some degree) that the ones that work can be considered good regardless of whether others don’t. I guess the question comes down to the following sort of consideration: is there one structure manifested in kem’s four examples (and the others we’ve cited), or two? To the extent that there are two, fine, sure, no problem, one is an eggcorn and the other isn’t. To the extent that there is only one, however, that one isn’t completely, or fully, or 100%, an eggcorn. Guilt by association? Perhaps. But if you’re one with the guilty, that association should not be ignored.
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(You’d be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t, at how much the question of 1 vs. 2, or the gradation between quantized one and two, niggles at my mind.)

Pat: Thanks for the extra citations. I have not been lucky in my selections of examples lately.

David: Pat’s additions are good, but I’m not ready to give up on the original set. I still see eggcorns there. Some of our differences may stem from the way we conceptualize the semantic relationship between acorns and eggcorns. So far we haven’t spent much time on this issue, other than to note that the semantics of both acorns and eggcorns must dip from the same well. This sharing of meaning, we have agreed, is essential to an eggcorn. Without it, the expressions are just malapropisms, or perhaps pails (Zwicky’s term, derived from“beyond the pail”).

A short glance at a list of eggcorns suggests that there are several types of semantic connections between acorns and their eggcorns. One of the more common patterns of semantic shift we might call partitive. People who utter an eggcorn do not, by definition, know the acorn word and its semantics. When they first hear the acorn, they have a semantic hole that they must fill in from context. Guessing the meaning of a word or a phrase from context usually results in generalization. If I hear, for example, “the dog flushed a gopher from its hole” and I don’t know the meaning of “flushed,” I would probably conclude that flushed meant something like “caused to leave.” I would miss the subtle overtones of the word “flush,” the picture of birds rising from cover with loud squawks and the beat of desperate wings. But the more general notion that I take from the context, brief as it is, will serve until reading or hearing can fill in the sketch. In the case of an eggcorn, the speaker starts with the generalization that results from using contextual clues and takes it down an alternate semantic pathway. The narrower semantics of the new path picks out a single aspect of the more general meaning. So if I try to use the expression I heard the next day and I say that “the dog freshed a gopher from its hole” (I’m making this up-I don’t know if this is an actual eggcorn.), then I have taken only a single part of the “caused to leave” meaning, that of making a new (fresh) appearance, and have made it stand for the more general one.

So when someone says that the unexpected appearance of the pope seemed like a “blessing in the skies,” my impression is that when the speaker (mis)heard “blessing in disguise” she generalized it to mean something like “a boon I hadn’t expected.” At a later point, when the speaker eggcorned the expression, she selected a single aspect of this inferred meaning and made it more specific by relating it to a miraculous event descending from above (“blessing in the skies”).

I believe the eggcorn “blessing in the skies” uses this partitive mechanism and that the issues you raise have to do with what you think the generalized meaning was. You are assuming that people who make the mistake should have generalized the meaning to the more specific “a boon that originally looked like a bane” when they first heard it. But the context of their exposures to the phrase may not have supplied enough clues to go beyond “unexpected boon.” Arguably, an eggcorn could be derived from either generalization.

Whether an eggcorn derived from a wide generalization is a good eggcorn, though, is another question. My impression is that the better eggcorns come from the less general generalizations. So someone starting from the inferred meaning “an unexpected boon that looked like a bane” would produce a more dramatic eggcorn than a person who started with the less specific “unexpected boon.” Take, for example, what Trissa writes at http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuse … =27774102:
“i guess with you that was a blessing in despise for it allowed me to see the truth.” She seems to have picked up the idea that the original expression was a boon that didn’t at first look like it would be a boon (i.e., it was something despised). To me this seems like a better eggcorn than “blessing in the skies.”

Is this a “pickled eggcorn”?

How-to health advice
The Heimlich remover is used to remove foreign objects from a
person’s airway to allow them to breathe normally.

I wonder if we can find a better term than “pickled eggcorn.” Maybe we can create an intentional reshaping that could pass for the real thing. Or something with a little more disdain for the ones whose coinings gain widespread popularity among the naive. The term I had in mind was ache-corn because its a blatant reshaping that conveys my disdain.

Corny enough that it might work.

Here’s a slight variation. Recently I encountered someone referring to the Elvis Presley song “Devil in Disguise” as “Devil in the Skies”. A mondegreen for sure; not so sure about its eggcornicity. Also, I even encountered one “Devil in the Sky”—apparently a back-formation from the malaprop “Devil in the Skies”.

Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2018-08-25 17:19:30)