The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Once in a while I select an eggcorn because it appears in the seach terms of visitors to this site (the Eggcorn Database & associated forums). When I saw “youthamism” ranked 15th both for the month of August 2009 and for the enitre year to date, it seemed to me that something of interest was happening here.

Peter Forster’s forum post, which attracted all these visits, lists two innovations: _youthamism_ as noted here, and the less eggcornish _euthamism_ (usually in effect a creative error for _euthanaisa_, maybe triggered by the less common -sia suffix). The variant _youthanism_ can be found, too, indeed at a higher frequency than _youthamism_. Both, as eggcornish substitutions for _euphemism_, rely on an association of coy camouflage of offending words with youth.

However, _youthanism_ and to a lesser degree _youthamism_ can occur in situations of questionable eggcorn status, in the sense of “youth slang” — a blendoid reshaping of euphemism, most likely:

* _You have to limit yourself on how many “get her done” and “gag me with a spoon” you can have in your life. Youthamism are just that, for the youth to use, no honest adult should fall for the MTV trappings._ (link)
* _Can we start calling young slang “youthanisms”?_ (link)
* _Reading numerous reviews of this hotel posted here is mystifying, many contrasting comments like “smells of urine” or “sparsely furnished,“ to such superlatives as “immaculate” and youthanisms like “Plush,” demonstrating that this hotels appeal is not bound by any generational gaps._ (link)

Last, for reasons that are not clear, we find cites where _youtha(n|m)ism_ is employed in the sense of “quote” or “maxim”:

* _I am doing a speech why Sir Paul McCartney should be on the 4th plynth in London..whatare some famous quotes? like quotes to help persuade people to have him up there. My teacher is fairly old - around 50-60 and likes old, famous quotes E.g. She likes the quote “lend me your ears” by William Shakespeare. Any youthanisms would be good._ (link)
* _need some help here… I need to know some youthanisms. I typed it into the search engine Google but it came up with nothing… By youthanisms i mean something like “I want to live life to it’s fullest” “I want to live out my time” “I want to live my 9 lives” That kind of stuff…_ (link)

Suggested to me by Roger Shuy on 18 May 2005, who even supplied a photograph (from an acquaintance) of a sandhill crane, with the caption “What in the Sand Hill is going on here?”

A reshaping of the utterly opaque “Sam Hill” expressions is entirely natural. Still, the numbers from a Google web search are small:
“what in the Sand Hill”: ca. 91
“what in Sand Hill”: 4
“what the Sand Hill”: 2
(I’ve removed references to Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road, home to venture capitalists and the Stanford Linear Accelerator.)

For comparison:
“what in the Sam Hill”: ca.832
“what in Sam Hill”: ca. 685
“what the Sam Hill”: ca. 642
(though a fair number of these cites are mentions of the expressions, not uses of them).

As for the “Sam Hill” originals, Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words concludes: “The expression has been known since the late 1830s. Despite the story [about a Connecticut politician named Sam Hill], it seems to be no more than a personalised euphemism for “hell”.” (www.worldwidewords.org/qa…). The euphemism source is supported by the odd syntax of “Sam Hill”, occurring (like “hell”) with “what in the”, “what in”, and “what the”.

Originally entered by xerby, who commented:

Just a phrase, “spitting image”, I’d heard for about forty years. And then one day someone on the radio said “spit and image” which immediately made more sense to me. In the first we could easily visualize a boy picking up his father’s bad habits(spitting…like mothers don’t spit), or if you’ve ever seen a boy walking with his dad you’d see the same gait(as well as image). In the second instance, “spit” infers a more visceral, biological, connection.
And, of course, the visual “image” stays as part of the phrase.

Most major dictionaries report that _spitting image_ is an alteration of _spit and image_. In an article in American Speech, however, Larry Horn argues that the expression was originally _spitten image_ (_spitten_ being a now-archaic dialectal form of the past participle of _spit_), and that both _spit and image_ and _spitting image_ are later reinterpretations. (The _American Speech_ link requires a subscription to Project Muse — see also Michael Quinion’s summary at World Wide Words).

Horn’s article also discusses various eggcornish reanalyses of _in_/_and_/_-in’_/_-en_, some of which appear elsewhere in the database (e.g., off the beat and path, once and a while).

Even though the word _encourageable_ (meaning “capable of or responding well to being encouraged”) probably exerts a pull on the spelling of _incorrigible_, I have marked the reshaping as _incourageable_ as a genuine eggcorn: The link between the _-corrig-_ component and _correct(ion)_ might indeed be rather obscure for many people. Moreover, except in the euphemism _correctional facility_, _correction_ isn’t employed very often to refer to discipline (or child rearing).

Sometimes, however, the conflation with _encourageable_ goes all the way, as in this entry from the Urban Dictionary:

> 1. Cretin
> An encourageable greenhorn. No matter how much you try, the person has no idea of what he is being instructed, nor does he care. The person is hopeless