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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Probably just a political writer’s error, but this is in the NY Times for April 15 2009, re Al Franken’s limbo position in the Minnesota senate race:
“It’s a weird thing: people are always asking me and Franni, ‘Are you okay?’ †he said, referring to his wife. “As sort of life crises go, this is low on the totem poll. But it is weird, it’s a strange thing.â€
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Let me take a crack at this one. I think this one deserves a place on the totem poll, as long as Al Franken can make under the limbo poll. Totem poll is used so frequently on the web that it almost seems to have become an accepted usage, at 15,400 raw Google hits. The examples I found were simple substitutions of the pail/pale sort, or deliberate blends of poll results with being low on the totem pole, and then several apparently genuine reimagings that did not seem deliberate. Is it possible that, following multiple instances of deliberate punning, it has escaped into the wild? I think a stronger case can be built by considering the original metaphor about one’s position on the totem pole. Ranking is explicit in the image. So your place on the totem pole is already making reference to status, popularity and perhaps public opinion. It seems natural to recast it as a poll in the mind of the hearer. In order for it to be an eggcorn, it seems to me that there must be evidence that the users do not know that a totem pole is a pole. It is this point that might be a bit sticky, but who knows.
Malapropism:
Cartoon characters:
The Totem Master: The Totem Master is an odd looking creature with a magic ring that turns beings into wood for his totem poll. The Totem Master went around giving his special totem poll to different communities and at night uses his ring to make the creatures on the poll come to life to steal from the village. Teebo and Latara are added to the totem poll before they can be saved.
Here are some deliberate puns:
GOV LOW MAN ON TOTEM POLL
(http://www.nypost.com/seven/01222008/ne … 570878.htm)
Another intentional play on poll:
The totem poll blog, wherein sports teams are ranked (deliberate misspelling avowed):
http://thepointafterrants.blogspot.com/search?q=totem
A “digital rhetoric” blog, which talks about self-identifying totemization on the web:
http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/2007 … -poll.html
Now this one may be eggcorn flavoured:
Blog post about social rank of nurses: The totem poll
http://www.snma.org/medconnect/forum/in … opic=137.0
Another pollster:
We asked our readers how the presidential transition was affecting them. While 66 percent stated they are too far down the totem poll to be bothered, 12 percent responded that they are running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
See also on this forum Big man on the totem pole
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It’s interesting that, etymologically, ‘poll’ originally meant head and that a freshly pollarded tree looks like a totem-pole work-in-progress. I’ve had a quick shufti but could find no totem-poll examples that indicated ignorance of its true ‘pole’ nature.
While I was at it I came across ‘totem pool’ – something along the lines of a gene pool perhaps – and hoped to find reference to the surface of a totem pool but was disappointed. ‘On’ and ‘up’ the pool suggests only that many people (169 ughits) have difficulty in spelling ‘pole’.
Today we all went to climb the cimbing wall in the center. then we went out to the totem poll and a big big tree i got to the top of the totem pool and half …
If anything, me and Long are probably at the bottom of the totem pool. I look at the Native Tongues as a microcosm of society. We make these records about …
I’m at the bottom of the totem pool people; it’s my lot in life and I have come to accept it. But I got a new dining room table and chairs. ...
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A quick shufti, eh? Do you perchance hail from the old sod, Peter?
Earlier I said that the users must not call a totem pole a pole in order that “totem poll” be an eggcorn. Upon reflection I see that this is not true; it would suffice that the users have a fuzzy conception of what constitutes a “poll”, and that they make a connection between an opinion poll and a post or pole. This connection is immediately evident – post itself has many senses that may or may not have originated from the same root, but include connections to positions and poles, and hence to polls. Thinking this one over, it occurred to me that Roony has probably stumbled upon another nileptic large fuzzy spot — a “trilight zone” perhaps. Now that Peter has linked in pool, we might have this dimly-made out constellation: pole, poll, polled (as in cattle), pollard, pull (too common to make the cut? – maybe its rarer uses), pall, appall, uppalling, Paul, pool and post. To these I would add other darkling branches of the family: boll (poll weevil?), bowl (it poled me over?), pellmell, and pal.
Acid tests: “cast a poll over”, “run pallmall”, “poll ax”, “rob Peter to pay fuzzy X”, “first past the poll|pole|post”...
I’m game, let’s drop some acid: rob Peter to pay X
News forum:
In order to lie to the investor and show a “no loss in bottom Line” because they made the wrong decision of hiring a clown to supervise the real workers ” cut the real workers pay and rob peter to pay pal ..... decreasing all kind of income to the every day accountable worker station in one place instead of running around in circles braking to fix from location to location.
(http://boards.msn.com/thread.aspx?threadid=888872)
Rip-off report:
THESE GUYS ARE ALL CONNECTED, THEY ARE AVERAGE CON ARTISTS, GOOD ONES DONT GET CAUGHT, BUT YET THEY USE THE IDEA OF THESE LEASING TERMS TO GET PEOPLES MONEY—- THERE IDEA IS—- ROB PETER TO PAY PALL—-ITS CALLED THE PONZI SCHEME
(http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/3 … 326393.htm)
By the way, I see that many people think you “cast a poll” which strikes me as an idiom blend of cast a vote and conduct, or run, a poll.
Last edited by burred (2009-04-16 14:30:37)
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Every year at election time I see references to “pulling places.” They may just be misspellings (“polling” and “pulling” sound the same for me), but I’ve often wondered whether people might have memories of the old gear-and-lever voting machines —you really did have to push/pull things in order to vote. They were long gone by the time I was a California voter, but they may have lingered elsewhere, subtly influencing reshapings.
Burred wrote
By the way, I see that many people think you “cast a poll†which strikes me as an idiom blend of cast a vote and conduct, or run, a poll.
The fact that polling places are places where you do your voting might help reinforce the vote/poll analogy.
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I like the connection to pulling for votes, Pat, and a light came on when you said that we vote at polling stations.
I just had to add a fairly poleaxing find (a hapax legomenonce, but this one would have to be). After “pay pal” above, I looked for “rob Peter to PayPal” – no hits, thank heavens. There is a “PayPaul” site, where some guy named Paul will accept any money that you have taken from Peter. But then a long shot led to this:
Hill Blog entry by Ga. GOP Rep. Tom Price:
I imagine a federal government that respects the hard work of all Americans. I imagine a federal government that respects hard earned tax payer money. I imagine a federal government that doesn’t rob Peter to Papal.
(http://blog.thehill.com/2007/03/14/putt … -spending/)
It looks for real. Beats me.
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Attested—and scary, to tell the truth:
paying Paul to rob Peter.
(Paul works for the IRS, but he confiscates in other ways.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Speaking of “pulling places”—when I went looking for that term online, I kept getting odd-looking citations from British sites. Peter, if you’re still around, what does “pulling place” mean in British slang when it’s applied to a bar or nightclub? A place noted for having a “singles scene”? My guess is that “pulling place” is more or less the same as the American “pickup joint,” but most of the citations were ambiguous.
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Spot on, Pat – a pulling place is any venue where you may “pull a burd” or, I suppose, a bloke. ‘Score’ used to be the preferred term but is less popular with the young. Old folk used to use ‘click’ but it’s rarely heard these days. I’m sure there were many more but I that’s all I can remember.
Burred – you had me a little confused there and I had to check to make sure ‘shufti’ wasn’t Irish. I’d always assumed it was Romany but in fact it’s Arabic for “try to see” or “have you seen”. Online dictionaries tell me it’s “old-fashioned” which I find surprising as I hear it quite often.
More pole/polls include a North and a South poll, swimming polls and gallows polls. And now I know that in Texas at least ‘pole tax’ is not a mis-spelled poll tax.
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Online dictionaries tell me it’s “old-fashioned†which I find surprising as I hear it quite often.
I can think of two equally reasonable explanations that might connect “old-fashioned” and what you hear.
On the topic of being old-fashioned: those of us in English Canada have noticed a distinct evolution of the mother tongue over the last fifteen years. Usually dialects evolve slowly enough that they stay under the radar of language mavens. Our Canadian children seem to be re-inventing Canadian English at double-time. An article in today’s Globe and Mail (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ … eMain/home) reports a recent study.
This is so, like, fun, but I totally have to get back to my stuff.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I magicked my own post out, Peter. Let’s transubstantiate to another section…1, 2 , 3, * then come back to wipe this area down for prints. I’m going in the direction of “The limits to this forum, and alternative venues” which is not what we were going on about, but timely I think.
Last edited by burred (2009-04-17 16:03:26)
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I think this theme warrants its own thread over on Slips etc – any chance of magicking it over there Pat?
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Peter—Thanks for the confirmation. That one seems to be utterly alien to American English—at least I’ve never heard anyone use “pull” in that way.
Everybody—The “Move topic” function only allows an entire thread to be moved to a different page of the site; you can’t move just a single post, unfortunately. But if anyone wants one of their own posts in this thread deleted, just tell me the number and I’ll make it go away.
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