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owe » own

Chiefly in:   owning to , own one's success to

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Rhead became a huge success within the ceramics and pottery industry owning to his ability to adapt to changing tastes and new forms of art.” (link)
  • “… to support the granting of a variance from the terms of the Billerica Zoning By-Law owning to circumstances relating to soil conditions, shape, …” (link)
  • “Today, owning to several factors including government sector reform policy, the world-wide trend of rapid development in telecommunications and information …” (link)
  • “Dell owns his success to the focusing on his customers…” (link)
  • “ ‘I own my success to education.’ Kamen also describes his father as his personal hero, …” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Linda Yanney (Usenet newsgroup soc.motss, 21 August 2005)

Although a fair number of the examples you can Google up were probably written by people who aren’t native speakers of English — Yanney provided an entertaining quotation from a French site on the deciphering of scripts — there’s still a big pile of clearly native cites, sampled above.

Yanney accounts for the semantics of the first cite above as follows: “Rhead owes his success to certain abilities; possessing, ‘owning,’ these abilities made his success possible.” The sense of personal possession is clear in the “own one’s success to” cites.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/08/22 |

benighted » beknighted

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Imagine the path of a beknighted soul as it paves its mark on the very hearts of all who hear of it.” (link)
  • “People from this beknighted time stream will be able to reach the more advanced and perfected culture of the alternative time stream.” (link)
  • “The gist of the commercials is that anyone who sticks with PC’s is a beknighted fool who doesn’t know what they’re missing.” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Ann Burlingham (Usenet newsgroup soc.motss, 15 August 2005)

This one can’t be a simple spelling error, since it replaces the incredibly frequent “night” with the much more specialized “knight”. Apparently the function of knights as guardians and protectors comes to the fore in this reshaping. What lets this work is that the function of the prefix “be-” has become opaque.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/08/21 |

beseech » besiege

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • I besiege you to keep on your front pages reminders to all the people of Hawaii of the atrocities that are occurring in our government in order for Hawaii to wake up and enter a new future with promise of prosperity achieved in honesty and with integrity in the absence of those holding the reigns today. (Hawaii Reporter, letter to the editor, Apr. 16, 2004)
  • I besiege you to vote your conscience and for once help put an end to the governmental abuse of the American citizens. (bmonday.com, June 1, 2004)
  • I besiege you to employ the services of two special agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation skilled in anti-kidnapping tactics to work with the dedicated team of Oswyn Allard’s Anti-Kidnapping Squad to track down, arrest and charge this gang of kidnappers. (Trinidad Guardian, letter to the editor, Mar. 21, 2005)
  • Lastly, if you’ve emailed us the last few months and not received a response to your query yet, may I kindly besiege you to pardon us as we were inactive and hardly accessed our emails. (Blazing Outdoor Adventurers & Co., Apr. 16, 2005)

The semantic range of besiege in the sense of ‘to harass or oppress with requests or complaints’ is not far from beseech ‘to ask fervently for something.’ But in cases where a single person makes a request politely rather than harassingly, it appears that _besiege_ is encroaching on the territory of _beseech_ (perhaps _besiege_ sounds more fervent?).

| Comments Off link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/07/22 |

arsed (or assed) » asked

Chiefly in:   can't be asked , half-asked

Classification: English – idiom-related – /r/-dropping

Spotted in the wild:

  • Me and Ali were debating and I was coming up with a complex system to form a utopia but it got REAL complex after a while, but it basically involved a super computer and everyone owning an equal sized patch of land and resources which they could share with others IF they wanted to if they agreed with each other on opinions to form like minded countries. There was a whole lot more to it but I can’t be asked to type it. (link)
  • Its finally half term(praise the lord!) and no doubt i’m gonna be sleeping,eating and…er sleeping all week. I need to do sociology cs/wk…but shit..i can’t be asked to do it…*poof*.. (link)
  • To me, a munchkin is someone who cannot be bothered to develop a personality for his or her character regardless of anything that is going on in the campaign. That’s what my 8 points were about. It’s the player who simply can’t be asked to role play in any way shape or form. That’s what makes munchkins so much not fun to play with. (link)
  • Children watch MTV, dress all scantily, think the people on Girls Gone Wild RULE, and do all kinds of provocative stuff at a younger age than I ever did. […] Gay marriage is just one of those things becoming more accepted by younger people, and frankly, the parents are frightened. Parents can’t be asked to raise thier kids! So of course, they want the BIG GOVERNMENT to do it for them, through laws! (link)
  • You either do it right and get meaningful data, or you do it half-asked and end up with meaningful sounding numbers that are devoid of anything substantial. (tuaw.com, blog comment, Jan 3, 2006)
  • A half-asked effort produces half-asked results. (Bodybuilding forum, February 12, 2002)

Analyzed or reported by:

On our Contribute! page, Simon reports this reshaping of a slang expression that, according to him, “has become common in England and Wales over the last ten years”. Indeed, he notes that _can’t be asked_ and _can’t be arsed_ sound nearly if not totally the same in some English accents.

A Google search suggests that the idiom _I can’t be arsed [doing/to do…]_ is still essentially British: 69,700 GHits with the spelling _arsed_ vs. only 3,880 that employ the American English equivalent _assed_.

However, an informal survey among a small number of American English speakers hinted at this idiom enjoying a growing popularity in the US while retaining the British English spelling _arsed_, “to express a quaint Englishness”, as one person put it.

That the form _can’t be asked_ is indeed an eggcorn, and not merely the result of deliberately weakening a taboo term, was confirmed to me by Jeannie Cool, who, citing the authority of a friend of hers, expressed the opinion that _can’t be asked_ was the original, “correct” term (and should therefore be the one employed in writing) whereas _arsed_ was what she saw as a slang corruption.

Several of the above examples were selected because they occur on web pages that contain other taboo words a short distance from the quoted passage and are therefore unlikely to have been used in order to avoid writing _arsed_.

_My thanks to the members of the `#suwcharman` and `#wordpress` IRC channels on `freenode` for reports on their usage._

[Update C.W., May 21, 2006: Added Ken Lakritz’s _half-asked_, with cites. The addition makes this something of a hybrid eggcorn. The idiom _can’t be arsed_ is clearly British, whereas _half-assed/arsed_ appears across English varieties. The spelling of the latter doesn’t seem to follow a clear-cut distribution. The Guardian Unlimited site, for example, contains, according to Google, 117 occurrences of _half-arsed_, but also 77 of _half-assed_.]

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/07/10 |

spout » sprout

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Kerry would have probably been quite similar to Bush but that added varnish of diplomacy would have allowed European leaders to keep sprouting their nonsense about significant similarities between us and the majority of Americans (commenter on the Guardian Newsblog)
  • She chuckled as she realized she was practically sprouting health class claptrap. (link)
  • This spiffy commentary page is powered by my wildlink database engine and should let me be able to sprout whatever random rants I come up with! (link)
  • That drape of ire blinded her from his warmth and she sprouted words of complete gibberish. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/06/25 |
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