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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Mohair is a silky fabric made from the wool of the Angora goat. The word originally came from Arabic mukhayyar meaning “select, choice.†The English form of the word appears to have been influenced by “hair,†so “mohair†already has an eggcornish history.
Do people who use this reshaping really believe the fabric is made from the hair of burrowing moles (or – worse – harvested from facial blemishes)? Well, I kinda hope not. But I don’t think that necessarily hurts the word’s claim to eggcornicity. A simple belief that the fabric is named for moles is probably enough.
This is very hard to count, but there are probably at least a few dozen ughits out there, even if you subtract all the misquotations of Elton John lyrics. Examples:
I can still see him there, in the run down bar, in his thrifted black mole hair sweater, and Doc Martins:
“Why are you throwing your life away here?” I thought as I looked at Jim that night.
http://bcstwentyyears.blogspot.com/search?q=mole+
So I’ve decided to post this impeccable molehair suit by Paul Smith to show mature hip hoppers how to separate the platinum from the white gold.
http://schoolyardent.com/blog/2009/02/1 … pper-swag/
She was sneezing and sniffling like she was allergic to my mole hair sweater.
http://www.westja.com/archives/2005_10.html
A mole hair suit and a seersucker jacket. Maybe a porkpie hat.
http://www.losttv-forum.com/forum/archi … 1-p-3.html
Semi-sheer and woven to look sort of like a long haired angora or mole hair sweater but its thicker poly.
http://cgi.ebay.com.sg/90S-CROP-KNIT-BL … dZViewItem
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A simple belief that the fabric is named for moles is probably enough.
As is the case with ‘moleskin’, a heavyweight cotton fabric with a velvety nap not unlike the fur of a mole. I should confess though, that when I first came across a pair of moleskin trousers I did peer inside for tell-tale traces of those tiny skins and I was both relieved and disappointed at their absence.
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I can only hope that those saying “mole hair” have small burrowing mammals in mind. To me “mole hair” calls to mind a facial nevus with long, thick black hairs growing out of it.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Peter—OK, how do you happen to know what the fur of moles feels like? Is mole fur actually used for anything?
Kem—Thanks for “nevus.” Always fun to learn new words—even when they refer to disgusting things.
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Pat: I once found a mole wandering across the floor of a library – what it was doing there I have no idea – so gingerly (because they bite) removed it before it came to harm. Apart from that, as a youth I examined dead ones courtesy of amateur molecatchers when I was contemplating learning just enough of taxidermy to make myself a bat-skin weskit. I abandoned the notion when I could find only enough dead bats to make, at best, a very immodest g-string.
It is rumoured that the famous Moleskin notebooks used to be clad in genuine moleskin, and garments of moleskin – stiff and hard-wearing apparently – were worn by pitmen and women working in collieries in Scotland and the North of England. More recently moleskins were used by plumbers to smooth joints in lead pipework immediately after soldering – the fur is bi-directional so the mole can move as easily backwards as it does forwards in those tight little tunnels.
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I’m very glad I asked this question. I’d be willing to bet that the string “bat-skin weskit” had never before been committed to print—though you may know otherwise.
I have an odd tale of mole-encounter myself. When I was about 8, my father drove me over to the community library one night, and there I checked out a pictorial guide to the mammals of North America. After leaving the library, we stopped at an auto parts store, and getting out on the passenger side I noticed something odd lying abjectly in the gutter. I’d never seen anything like it before, but my dad said it was a mole. The strange thing was that it had a very weird-looking, multi-pointed nose. I retrieved the mammal guide, and there it was—the “star-nosed mole.” I felt like I’d been touched by the hand of God—how likely was it that the only time I ever saw a mole happened to be on an occasion when I had just gotten hold of a guide to moles?
But the story gets stranger, or perhaps disappointing. Decades later, I looked up star-nosed moles on the Web. First of all, their range (largely the NE US and nearby parts of Canada) wouldn’t bring them within 2,500 miles of California. And second, the noses of the real SNM’s are kinda scary—nothing like the true star-shapes of my childhood memory. Can’t explain it.
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I’d be willing to bet that the string “bat-skin weskit†had never before been committed to print
“Bat-skin weskit” is not even a googlewhack
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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