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Chris -- 2018-04-11
A mangle, for those old enough to remember the appliance, is the wringer of an old-fashioned washing machine. It can also be a separate machine. A mangle extracts excess water from washed clothes by squeezing them between two drums. Picture is here.
The English noun “mangle†can be traced back through Dutch and German to the Latin “manganum,†the word for a kind of catapult. The referent of “mangle†changes over the years as the technology changes, of course, and by the time we get back to the Roman Empire the referent looks very different than a modern mangle. I’m not sure what aspect of a catapult is reproduced in a clothes wringer. Perhaps it is the crank. Or even the notion of something being squashed (ewwww!).
The verb mangle, meaning to mutilate, sneaked into English from Norman French antecedents with the same meaning. There is no etymological connection to the wringer “mangle.â€
Confusing the two “mangles†would constitute a hidden eggcorn. Hidden eggcorns can be hard to document, but in this case I can cite an unimpeachable source for the confusion: me. In my befuddled brain the verb “to mangle†was always connected to the mangle device. I thought that if I got my hand too near the mangle it would be “mangled.â€
A more traditional eggcorn lies near at hand. The word “manhandle†is probably derived from the verb “mangle†This derivation is clearer in some English dialects, where “manhandle†is written as “manghangle†(so says the English Dialect Dictionary by Joseph Wright). If “manhandle” is sourced from “mangle,” then the words “man†and “handle†are eggcornical phantoms.
Last edited by kem (2009-05-28 11:13:54)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Really interesting. I too had always assumed that the noun “mangle” and the verb “mangle” were related.
I also had never suspected “manhandle’s” potential eggcornish pedigree—which shows just how good an eggcorn it is if the idea is accurate. I notice that the dating gets interesting for this one—Malory used “manne-handled” in the 1470s, but the first citation for “mangle” is a circa 1500 (for another Arthurian text that the editors guess may have been composed circa 1450). Obviously, they don’t bother giving dates for the Anglo-Norman uses, but it’d be interesting to know how common the “mahangler” spelling was in ANF.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-05-28 00:55:07)
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I share Pat’s surprise that the two mangles have different parents as mangles (wringers) frequently mangled (mutilated) the buttons on shirts for example, and being squashed between wooden rollers should certainly qualify as mutilation. I wonder whether either of them or their echoes in manhandle share any ancestry with the Midlands term ‘manangle’ which is often used to denote a tricky manoeuvre accomplished by brutish persistence and perhaps a measure of luck or, alternatively, a clumsily executed task.
Urban Dictionary: manangle
manangle – 1 definition – Manage to tangle your way into something. Referring to the ability to manipulate a situation to your benefit—or descri…
www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=manangle – 18k – Cached
said, we Texans are quite capable of manangling our very own version of the English language. – Gradale now. That would be an interesting …
www.mail-archive.com/nelayan_indo@setio … 07448.html – 9k – Cached
Got my parking permit set up, though it took some time to get things fully set up, as I had to do some manangling of cars added to the system and such. ...
al4you.blogspot.com/ – 16k – Cached
They baggering ‘ounds manangled tha vox all tii pieces avore I ciide stap urn.’ Mapsing = smacking the lips with relish. ’ ‘Er dawnt zim tii ‘ave iver ‘ad a …
www.archive.org/stream/peasantspeechofd … e_djvu.txt – 277k – Cached
... unreasonable that they should be silenced? btw if there are any philosphy students here please help, I fear I may hand badly manangled Mill’s arguments. ...
incel.myonlineplace.org/forum/showthread.php?t=818&page=2
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Yes, fascinating stuff. And much of it news to me.
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The opposite of manangling a situation, is, I suppose, finangling it? (Better do another post on that one.)
*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 also had never suspected “manhandle’s†potential eggcornish pedigree….
I agree, there are some missing links in the “mangle/manhandle” transition. Spotting eggcorns from the period between Chaucer and Shakespeare, when English was moving from an almost totally spoken language to a popular written language (and I’m just beginning to realize just how many eggcorns there are from this period), usually means doing creative reconstructions from assumed sources. Sometimes, as in the case of “laborinth,” we get a break and find the eggcorn in the source language, but mostly we are left scratching our heads about where (and sometimes whether) the eggcornical act occurred.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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