The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

In the Eggcorn Forum, kem writes:

If our plans misfire, we can chalk it up to experience and go on. “Chalk it up to” means to attribute to, with overtones of bringing the matter to closure. The idiom, which has been with us for several hundred years, may derive from an early alehouse custom of writing customer tabs on a slate with chalk.

Hundreds of web sites think that the idiom is “chuck it up to” (See examples below.). But what is it about “chuck” that licenses its substitution for “chalk” in this idiom? Some possibilities:

• To “chuck up” can mean to vomit. I don’t think this is in view in “chuck it up to.”
• An old sense of “chucking” is throwing. We still use it in sport contexts to refer to throwing a ball (“Just chuck the pigskin in his direction: the new wide receiver can vacuum up anything.”).
• An extension of this sense of “chucking,” sometimes phrased as “chucking up,” gives us the meaning of throwing over, giving up, discarding. (“If the boss says one more word I’m going to chuck this job.”). To “chuck it up to experience,” then, might refer to giving up on (=chucking) an effort by consigning it to (=chucking it into) one’s basket of bad experiences.

There may also be some cross-fertilization from the idiom “chucking in the towel,” a circumlocution for quitting.

See also chalk » chock, chock » chalk(ed).

See also chalk » chuck, chock » chalk(ed).

The title of Mark Liberman’s 2004 Language Log piece gives a whole pile of variants: “Chock, choke, chuck, check, chalk, jock, shock, chog: An ancient plantation of ache-corns”. “Choke-full” is the original (with “chuck-full” and “chock-full” as early variants); “chock-full” is now the dominant variant. “Chock” doesn’t make much sense, so it’s no surprise that people have attempted to re-shape it. The connection to chalk is obscure (Brians: “Chalk has nothing to do with it”), but at least “chalk” is a reasonably common actual word (and homophonous with “chock” for some speakers).

“Chalk full” has been reported at least five times in the ecdb comments pages.

See also chalk » chock, chalk » chuck.

[added 4 September 2011, from an ADS-L posting by Larry Horn:

One point that’s not mentioned in the write-ups at the Eggcorn Database is the possibility of reinterpretation due to the Northern Cities vowel shift, which notoriously affects vowels in words like “chock”, “chuck”, and “chalk”. While homophony is possible, as Arnold observes in the [entry above], but there’s also the clash … between the “before” and “after” dialects, those without and those with the Northern Cities shift, so that someone (non-shifted) saying “chalk” [COk] would be heard (by a shifter) as saying “chuck”. A very brief summary of such shifts is available here, where “stock”, “stuck”, and “stalk” are exemplified. ([See the] wiki entry here.)]

The politeness of the curtsey as a gesture probably accounts for “courtesy” >> “curtsey”. “Curtsey of” in attributions of sources, as in the first three cites, is reasonably frequent — about 4,000 Google webhits on 1 July 2005 (as against about 26,000,000 for “courtesy of”) — while “curtsey call” is much less frequent (ca. 100 webhits) and is mostly confined to sources in Africa and South Asia, though the cite above is from a source in Northern Ireland.