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Chris -- 2018-04-11
In Arnold Zwicky’s recent blog entry discussing the word “spendthrift,†he notes that some speakers latch onto the “thrift†half of the word and conclude that a spendthrift is a stingy person. “Spendthrift,†of course, means the exact opposite of this: a spendthrift is a profligate spender. As Michael Quinion observes in his World Wide Words blog, the “thrift†part of “spendthrift†derives from “thrive.†A spendthrift is one who prospers, either because of or in spite of excessive spending.
Zwicky may be right about the trend toward misunderstanding the meaning of “spendthrift.” Web examples are hard to find, but on this link is an actual confession of the mistake.
Dozens of web authors avoid the derivation problem by changing the word “thrift†to “drift:â€
Malaysian online paper “Her King Louis XIV and his queen Marie Antoinette were spend drift and bled the nation’s coffers dry.â€
A prose poem on something that looks like a blog “The spenddrifts, who wasted everyhing they had, were pushing a giant rock toward the selfish hoardersâ€
Community online newspaper “As it happened, the fact that I tackled the job on April 14 contributed to my spenddrift ways.â€
A “spenddrift†is, I presume, either a person who drifts into spending habits, a person who spends drifts of money, or a person who drifts along without attention money.
Last edited by kem (2011-08-14 08:46:25)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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It would be splendid to spend drifts of money. Perhaps that’s why there are 8 ughits for splendthrift. I liked this one best, from a Filipino web digest :
Should the private life of a public official be an issue at the polls then? Yes if the candidate is also (check these out) inherently lazy, an adulterer, an incurable alcoholic, suspected murderer, kidnapper, an embezzler, a spouse-beater, a bad employer, a nobrainer, an addict, and a splendthrift.
On the other hand, p is awfully close to l on the keyboard.
Is a spend drift more likely in countries that have difficulty with th?
Other variants drifting around out there, in line with the marvelous spend drift , are spend drifter and spinthrift. Spend rift is similarly and spendrift more frequent than spend drift. Hard to tell if any evolved from the other.
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“Splendthrift.” Good one, perhaps better than “spenddrift.” It carries a sense of extravagance.
The English “th” sound is a tongue-twister for most ESL speakers, isn’t it? Seems like most of them can only manage a soft “d” sound.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Thrift(y) long ago shifted its center of gravity from “prospering†to “(prospering by means of) wise economy/frugalityâ€. ( Thrive did not shive its meaning in the same way, which says something about the status of the thrive > thrift shift as derivational rather than inflectional.) Many probably, like me, and including perhaps the original users of the word, take thrift in spendthrift to be “what has been saved up by thriftâ€. So the spendthrift is one who wastefully spends what had been previously saved up (usually by a thrifty forebear).
I would never have supposed there to be an implication that the spendthrift thereby thrives
“A spendthrift is one who prospers, either because of or in spite of excessive spending.â€
Quite the contrary, in fact.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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