The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Given that _snub_ v. tr. means something close to _behaving like a snob towards (so. or sth.)_, it is certainly not surprising to find a verb _snob_ where traditionally _snub_ would be expected. What I did find surprising was the sheer versatility of _snob_, the verb.

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In her Boston Globe column _The Word_ of October 9, 2005, Jan Freeman reflects on what Arnold Zwicky has called the Recency Illusion: the idea that if you’ve noticed some non-standard or uncommon bit of language only recently, you believe that it in fact originated recently (see Arnold Zwicky’s Language Log articles here and here). As an example, she quotes a particular understanding of _shuffle off this mortal coil_, which is in effect a hidden eggcorn:

> The bait was a quotation, in a New York Times book review, from Greg Critser’s “Generation Rx,” saying that pharmaceuticals now promise “everything from guarding us against our excesses of drink, food and tobacco … to extending our very time on this mortal coil.”
>
> “On this mortal coil?” But when Hamlet speculates about having “shuffled off this mortal coil,” in what must be Shakespeare’s most-quoted speech, we all know he’s not talking about a Savion Glover move-don’t we? “Shuffle off” means “get rid of, dispose of,” says the OED, and “mortal coil” means “the bustle or turmoil of this mortal life.”
>
> So was Critser’s misunderstanding a new one? Of course not. To judge by Google hits, hundreds of people think “shuffling off this mortal coil” involves going somewhere on foot. Even in edited sources, people have been getting it wrong for nearly 20 years.

The eggcorn relies on an interpretation of _shuffle_ as “move or walk in a sliding dragging manner without lifting the feet” (Where did he shuffle? Off this mortal coil.) instead of the verb-plus-particle _shuffle off_ “get rid of, dispose of” (What did he shuffle off? This mortal coil.)

For hidden eggcorns, which do not involve a change in spelling, we often need indirect evidence of the writers’ understanding of the expressions they use. This can come in the form of examples that use _on and off this mortal coil_, the double preposition _off of_, or synonyms of _shuffle_, such as in the following examples:

* I suppose if I had to stagger off of this mortal coil, “beer potomania” wouldn’t be such a bad way to go (compared to most of the other diseases in this book). (Amazon book review)
* Tell me something - does he get to sleep with Elizabeth Shue before he lurches off this mortal coil? (Barry Glendenning, Guardian Unlimited Football, June 20, 2004 )
* There are numerous surveys that suggest that women who live alone spend their time skipping gaily through the tulips and sipping at crystal streams of joie de vivre until they eventually slip off this mortal coil with a gentle sigh of satisfaction between snow-white linen sheets, while men forget how to wash, walk and talk and are eventually killed by MRSA from their own underpants and expire in a sticky heap of jazz mags and burger buns. (Lucy Mangan, Guardian Unlimited, March 2, 2005)

_Locusts_, mainly in the abstract singular _the locust of …_, have entered figurative language via the biblical reference to the destructive swarms that consumed the crops in Egypt (the eighth of the ten plagues), and the locusts of the apocalypse. The metaphor for an overwhelming, all-devouring force is found in modern Christian-revivalist wrtiting, as in:

* _I will raise up an army of disciples and apostles in you. Ambassadors of Christ, minister’s of reconciliation. They will enter the land with a sound of preparation and restoration. They will restore the years that the locust of war have devoured. Mighty peacemakers will come from you Yugoslavia._ (link)
* _The fruit of hard parental labor was devoured by the locust of humanistic values, never to yield a truly bountiful harvest for the Lord._ (link)

From there it is only a step to a secular metaphor:

* _Pakistan was still in its first innocence, the fervour and idealism of independence lingering in the air and the locust of military rule that was to descend on the land soon – never really to leave – the last thing on anyone’s mind._ (link)

The expression _a locust of …_ also came to denote “a great number of”, maybe via the metonymy _locust»swarm_, as suggested by Nathan Bierma in his article of November 10, 2004, for the Chicago Tribune:

> Election night is when newscasters turn off their teleprompters and let their language run wild. Analyst David Gergen commented to CNN’s Lou Dobbs that Ohio and Florida were host to a “locust of lawyers” (using “locust” to mean “swarm,” because locusts swarm — columnist George Will had used the term “locust litigation”).

Other rather more obscure occurences of _a locust of …_ may be linked to this sense:

* _Is Arnold capable of leading this state, let alone this country… let alone this generation? I say no — but not because he is a Republican or that he will lead a locust of special interests into California._ (link)
* _I often day dream I have magical powers, sort of like Matilda. I would make people do funny things, start a locust of little teeny-tiny yellow fuzzy baby chicks and make a dessert buffet table appear out of nowhere._ (link)

None of these considerations explain the substitution _locus»locust_, but they provide an already rather fuzzy backdrop for it.

From counting Google hits, _little lone_ seems to be slightly more common than _little own_. Even though the meaning of _lone_ and _own_ is quite different, we have entered both variants into the same entry: the salient part of the semantical reanalysis seems to be _little_, ie a lack or low degree.

Several of the examples show that the substitution of what would have to be seen as an adjective for the formulaic _let alone_ gives can lead the writer into serious syntactic difficulties, which are resolved more or less felicitously.