Eggcorn Forum

Interesting take on pretray. definitely seems like putting on a facade prior to “beTRAYing your true nature”

OED on portray:
[< Anglo-Norman purtraire, purtreire, purtrere, purtrayer and Middle French portraire, purtraire, pourtraire (French portraire) to draw, to represent (1154 in Old French in past participle, purtrait), to describe (12th cent.), to shape, fashion (12th cent. in Anglo-Norman), to decorate, to paint (12th cent.), to imagine, to form a mental image of (12th cent.) < pur-,por- PUR- prefix + traire to draw (a line, etc.), spec. use of traire to draw, drag (see TRAIN v.1). Compare classical Latin protrahere to draw forward, to reveal, to extend, to prolong, in post-classical Latin also to draw, portray, paint (see PROTRACT v.).]

OED on betray:

[ME. bi-, betraien, f. bi-, BE- 2 + traien TRAY, a. OF. traïr:{em}L. trad{ebreve}re to deliver, hand over.]

But isn’t alternate and reasonable imagery for pre enough? Many restructurings which have been accepted as eggcornish only restructure part of a word and leave the other part as unanalyzable as the whole was before the restructuring. Granted that it would be a better eggcorn if the tray part made more sense.
.
Of course, portray is not entirely unanalyzable even for modern speakers (whose viewpoint I was trying to represent when I wrote: “Who knows what por- would be about (let alone what – traying is)”. I think many modern speakers do have some sort of vague idea about both por- and -tray. Some of us even know of the connection -tray/-tract/draw/drag. To whatever extent that analysis is available, surely the substitution of pre ‘ahead of time, perhaps to avoid’ for por ‘(not sure what)’ is eggcornish.
.
All this not to deny, of course blendish influences from words like betray, prevent , etc. But as has been argued before, such things do not deny eggcornhood, but may rather produce it.

I like David Tuggy’s word “pretrayed,” too, but I’m not sure it’s the one our angry Philadelphian was using. Here’s the original sentence again:

I just don’t like you at all because of what I thought it was going to be and what you pretrayed yourself to be were both 2 different things.

In context, the writer seems to be drawing a comparison between what they expected the guy to be like beforehand (“what I thought it was going to be”) and what he actually turned out to be like afterward (“what you pretrayed yourself to be”). So I don’t think the definition of “pretrayal” as “the treacherous way you present yourself beforehand” works here—the writer seems to have meant the opposite. I googled “pretray/pretrayal”; it turns out to be much more common than I’d expected—easily 100s of instances—and the great majority of those look to be substitutions for “portray/portrayal,” etc. There are however a handful of cases where “betray/betrayal” seems to work a bit better, and I think this is such a case: “I just don’t like you at all because of what I thought it was going to be and what you betrayed yourself to be were both 2 different things.” In this particular case, I think “pretrayed” is a malaprop because the main justification for its eggcornicity—the idea that pretrayal is one’s disingenuous self-presentation when first meeting someone else—doesn’t fit the context.

But let’s ignore all that and turn to the point Jorkel made in his first post. Would “pretrayal” be an eggcorn if it fit the context better? It’s a tough question, and I’m wondering as I type this whether I will have provided a definitive attempt at an answer by the end. But I’m pretty sure that the answer has something to do with a topic we’ve rarely discussed: the ways single-yolked and double-yolked eggcorns create meaning.

All regulars know I’m a big fan of double-yolkers. “Eggcorn” is of course the classic example: the “egg” part seems to imply the shape of the object described (and—to a less exact degree—some sense of its size), while the “corn” part implies a vaguely roundish, seed-like thing produced by plants. The two parts work pretty well together to provide a visual sense of an acorn’s most salient characteristics. There aren’t a whole lot of small, egg-shaped, seed-like things out there that most people would be intimately familiar with, so “eggcorn” is a surprisingly effective and concise equivalent for “acorn.” And that’s the beauty of many double-yolkers: they act as a kind of verbal Venn diagram that identifies things or concepts that bring together two different ideas—and this conjunction can result in a surprising degree of precision and contextual appropriateness.

But that apparent “precision” may be a sort of illusion that is itself a product of context. One of my favorite double-yolkers is “dayview” for “debut.” Again, it works really well in the places where you would normally encounter “debut.” Something that is ‘dayviewed” is brought to the “light of day” for the very first time. The conjunction of “day” and “view” neatly triggers metaphorical associations that help justify the substitution.

But part of what makes “dayview” so wonderful is its “natural” feel—somehow it has the texture of a word that could have grown up quite organically hundreds of years ago and been in constant use ever since. But it could easily have meant something else. Wouldn’t “to dayview something” have been a great choice for a verb that meant “to build something so that it faces south and catches more of the light/warmth of the sun”? (I hope Sandi or any other Antipodeans will forgive me my Northern bias.) Or—more prosaically—it might have come to mean “to picture something in a strong light,” a potentially useful technical term for artists. My point is that the meaning of the eggcorn “to dayview” as “to debut” remains dependent on the context of the original. I feel eggcorns are always “haunted” by their acorns. They appear by definition in precisely the same contexts as their originals, and that contextual matrix helps shape the way an eggcorn creates meaning, and it may also supply a kind of subconscious “residue” or “trace” of the original word or phrase.

That haunting is even more pronounced with single-yolkers. I’m pleased that my find “bloodgeon” made it into the Database—it’s simultaneously cool and icky, and I like it. But if you think about it, it’s not a very expressive eggcorn. If you don’t know “bludgeon,” there’s very little in “bloodgeon” to give you a sense of what the word means. And not all bludgeoning involves “blood.” On the other hand, some of history’s most notorious bludgeonings (e.g., the Parker-Hulme murder in New Zealand) have been very bloody affairs, and the reshaping unquestionably opens up a salient aspect of the word’s semantic potential. I think it’s a good eggcorn despite its single-yolkedness. But “bloodgeon” relies very strongly on the subconscious support of the original.

So what about “pretrayed” in David T’s definition? (Hey [tap, tap], anyone still out there?) It, too, is a single-yolker: the “tray” element by itself remains pretty opaque, and the “pre” is all that points to a new set of imagery for the reshaping. As a result, I’d have to say that “pretrayal” is rather weaker than, say, bloodgeoning. Like Jorkel, I just don’t think that that prefix carries enough imagistic heft to make the new phrase a good eggcorn.

That said, I’m not quite ready to declare it no eggcorn at all. This one’s a fringe-rider, and I can see people who are well acquainted with the eggcorn concept going either way. That “haunting” of a new form by the old can be a surprisingly powerful force in lexical innovation. I’m reminded of the strange case of the word/brand “Discman.” When Sony first released the Walkman around 1980, it seemed like the “Walk” element was the one that carried a sense of the unit’s portability. But a weird thing happened when the first portable CD player appeared in 1984. As far as I know, Sony didn’t call the Sony D-50 CD Compact Player “the discman” when it first came out; that was (I believe) a nickname that grew up organically—the Wikipedia “Discman” article seems to confirm my memory, but that’s all the documentation I’ve found so far. The name felt quite natural to me at the time, even though I was aware that somehow people had transferred the sense of the portability of the unit from the “Walk” element of “Walkman” to the “man” element of “Discman.” Discman, in effect, continued to be haunted by its “acorn.” Later, Sony portable CD units actually carried the Discman name, but some years ago Sony switched to the official term “CD Walkman”—which makes more conscious sense but lacks the zing of the earlier version.

That “tray” element in pretrayal may carry enough association with “portray” or “betray” in people’s minds to help justify DT’s earlier comments. But I’m just not sure. This line of thinking has the potential to fuzzy up the already-fuzzy definition of eggcorn.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-05-30 16:26:41)

Pat’s analysis really is top notch. I find the direction he maps out for the reshaping to be quite credible. This, for instance, makes a lot of sense:

There are however a handful of cases where “betray/betrayal” seems to work a bit better, and I think this is such a case: “I just don’t like you at all because of what I thought it was going to be and what you betrayed yourself to be were both 2 different things.” In this particular case, I think “pretrayed” is a malaprop because the main justification for its eggcornicity—the idea that pretrayal is one’s disingenuous self-presentation when first meeting someone else—doesn’t fit the context.

(Hmmm… I wonder if the notion of pre + trial is ever invoked in some contexts).

The other thing that occurs to me is the pronunciation of pretrayal. If it’s an esculator of portrayal, I could certainly conceive of someone pronouncing it as pret + trayal (first syllable rhymes with pet). If it’s an eggcorn/malaprop of betrayal, I would expect to hear pre + trayal (first syllable rhymes with pea). I don’t know if this shifts anyone’s paradigm on this.

Last edited by jorkel (2009-05-30 23:43:23)