The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

On Language Log, Mark Liberman writes:

For most Americans, hurtle is pronounced exactly the same way as hurdle. And hurdle, in addition to being commoner than hurtle (about 7.69 per million for the “hurdle” and “hurdles” in COCA, compared to 0.60 for “hurtle” and “hurtles”), has the advantage of referring to a concrete type of object and a specific associated action.

This creates the perfect situation for eggcorn creation: a relatively rare and somewhat archaic word that is pronounced in just the same way as another word that is much more common in everyday usage, and has a clear meaning that overlaps at least metaphorically with most examples of the more unusual word.

If you hurtle through or towards something, you don’t necessarily hurdle any obstacles — but if there were any obstacles in your way, you probably would hurdle them. And the idea of moving quickly without regard for obstacles is not a bad proxy for the usual uses of hurtle.

Commenting on Facebook about another example, Bert Vaux observes that “this is one of those cases like hearty/hardy where the deneutralization in favor of the voiced option yields a not entirely implausible interpretation.”

Wallraff reports:

Suzanne Staszak-Silva, of Scotch Plains, N.J., writes: “My husband and I have a dispute regarding the use of the term landline. When people receive or make calls on a cellular phone but decide they would like to take the call on a phone connected to the wall via a phone jack, they usually refer to this phone as a landline. My husband says this is incorrect and the right term is LAN (local-area network) line. I say he’s wrong. I think people use landline to denote a phone that is connected to the large brown poles that line our streets, and that LAN line refers to computer connections. Who is correct?”

You are. Anyone who doesn’t want to call a phone line a phone line ought to call it a WAN (wide-area network) line. And thanks for the new eggcorn.

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This one is not easy to search for, because “LAN line” is a high-frequency expression, abbreviating “local area network line”, a line (telephone line or cable) serving a local area network; such connections involve lines only indirectly, usually wirelessly, rather than having computers directly plugged into a phone line.

As for Wallraff’s advice, anyone who wants to refer to a phone directly connected to a phone line should call it a landline phone. WAN lines are something else.

In any case, Staszak-Silva’s husband has improved on “landline”, with its unclear connection to land, by eggcorning it to “LAN line”, using a term he’s familiar with.

When Eggcorn Forum contributor Kirk pointed out the use of floorless for flawless in the Antimoon forum (see last citation above), the original poster claimed that “floorless is simply another way of spelling flawless here” (the poster hails from northern New Zealand). That claim is hard to justify, though floorless is an obvious pronunciation spelling for non-rhotic speakers who homonymize floor and flaw.

The semantic rationalization is a bit difficult to discern. Perhaps “floor” is taken as a metaphor for a limit, so something that is “floorless” is limitless in its excellence.

The first cite is the one given by Hart; it’s from the Writer’s Digest website, where “forward” seems to be used pretty consistently. Fabian noticed an occurrence in the New York Times (not given here).

The analysis of “foreword” is probably opaque to most modern speakers, so there is a real temptation to treat occurrences of it as occurrences of its homophone “forward”. After all, a foreword comes forward of, in front of, the body of the book.

[Added 14 April 2009: this one seems to be very common. Using data unearthed by Eugene Volokh, Victor Steinbok calculates that 9% of the law review articles between 2000 and 2009 that have a foreword list it as “forward”.]

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms has the following about _cut to the chase_:

> Get to the point, get on with it, as in _We don’t have time to go into that, so let’s cut to the chase_. This usage alludes to editing (cutting) film so as to get to the exciting chase scene in a motion picture. [Slang; 1920s]

I can only guess that the variant _cut to the cheese_ relies on a similar idea, only related to food: a cheese course is usually served at the end of a meal.