hollandaise » holiday(s)

Chiefly in:   holiday(s) sauce

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • I found an eggcorn at brunch yesterday! My boyfriend asked me if I liked the holiday sauce on my poached eggs. I asked him to repeat himself so I could be sure of what I’d heard. Once I told him the actual name of the sauce, he said that he’d always wondered what holiday the sauce was originally from. (lolphysics on Eggcorn Forum)
  • I grew up thinking hollandaise sauce was actually called “holidays sauce” because we only ever had it on holidays. (Manolo for the Big Girl site, on Arnold Zwicky's blog)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Arnold Zwicky (link)
  • various posters on Eggcorn Forum (link)

The eggcorn came up in a Zits cartoon strip, and that led me back to the Eggcorn Forum discussion. Yet another variant, Holland day sauce is posted on separately.

The connection to holiday food is clearly made in several of the sources.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2012/06/13 |

manna » manner

Chiefly in:   manner from heaven

Variant(s):  manor

Classification: English – /r/-dropping

Spotted in the wild:

  • I have come out of the Auckland winter so this cool court which takes a shot and lets the ball die when it is manner from heaven for me. (Cathay Pacific Squashtalk, Aug. 25, 2001)
  • When you get messages like this repeatedly, and your Bank Account is empty, with outstanding bills for you to pay, your first instinct would be to get it and say thank God for the ‘blessings and manner from Heaven’. (Nigeriaworld, Mar. 21, 2002)
  • To you and me, the money means very little, but to a poor person this will be manner from heaven. (Africa Economic Analysis, 2003)
  • For the Opposition Leader, Simon Crean, the words of the American President have been manner from heaven. (ABC (Australia) radio transcript, Feb. 11, 2003)
  • I think Bush has exploited Al Qaeda for foreign policy and electoral objectives - and Al Qaeda have exploited Bush, who’s Crusade gaffs and images of Abu Gharaib and collateral damage from Iraq must have seemed like manor from heaven. (Uplink forum post, July 16, 2005)
  • For a quarter of a century, Cameroonians were waiting for political and economic manner from heaven but all in vain. (Cameroon Post reader comment, Dec. 13, 2005)
  • The Children of Israel in Exodus chapter 16 forgot God’s goodness and power and complained that Moses brought them into the wilderness to kill them but God provided them with manner. […] So too did the people of Israel - they were provided for with Manner from Heaven in Exodus chapter 16: 4 - 9. (Grenada Today, sermon by Pastor Stanford Simon, Feb. 11, 2006)
  • This Best Buy information is treated like manner from heaven for those of us bent on emulating scrooge! (Whatprice.co.uk)

In the form manor from heaven, this often appears as a non-rhotic pun. But most of the examples for manner from heaven are more clearly eggcorns (frequently from speakers of various African Englishes).

| 1 comment | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2006/05/22 |

founder » flounder

Classification: English – questionable

Spotted in the wild:

  • As the wind became stronger, the tiny boat floundered in the waves. (link)
  • With almost all of its sails fully flown, the ship floundered in the swells off of the Outer Banks for a while before breaking apart. (link)

When a ship is awash with water and unable to manoeuvre normally, it is said to founder. Perhaps because flounders are fish in the same seas as the ships, it’s almost more common to refer to a ship, today, as floundering than foundering.

In fact, in one of the references added here, flounder is actually given as a vocabulary word, erroneously defined as a boat awash in the sea.

Addendum/edit by CW, 2005/10/25: The substitution _founder/flounder_ (in both direction) has been submitted to the Eggcorn database several times and is discussed by Paul Brians and the American Heritage Book of English Usage. It is, however, not an eggcorn. The two verbs are phonologically and semantically similar, but it is unclear that one is being reanalyzed in terms of the other. An eggcorn requires that someone has understood the sense and spelling of word they actually employ, but not the word that is conventionally used in that particular case. See also Arnold Zwicky’s discussion of _flout»flaunt_ (also not an eggcorn).

Addendum/edit by AZ, 2005/10/26: Harsh, Chris, harsh. In fact, some people have explained to me that “flounder” is the word to use, because a ship in this sort of distress flops about like a fish — a flounder, in particular — out of water. The association with flounder (the fish) seems to be unetymological: OED2 labels it “of obscure etymology”, suggests various non-fishy sources, and gives as its earliest sense the not particularly fish-related ’stumble’ (attested from 1592). But then the sense extended to ’struggle violently and clumsily, struggle in mire’ and the way was open for comparison to a flopping flounder. (Suspiciously, several of the OED2’s citations actually mention fish.) In any case, “flounder, founder” is a great favorite of usage advisers: there’s a MWDEU entry with references to earlier writers, and most of the recent usage dictionaries have an entry — Bryson, Burchfield, Fiske, Garner, O’Conner, and Steinmann & Keller, in addition to Brians and the American Heritage folks. Of these authorities, only Steinmann & Keller (Good Grammar Made Easy, 1999, p. 140) seem to make the fish connection, but they still tell you not to use “flounder” for sinking vessels: “flounder, founder Sometimes confused. To flounder is what a fish (the flounder, for example) does out of water (move clumsily); figuratively, to be active without accomplishing anything. To founder is to sink because full of water: figuratively, to fail.”

| Comments Off link | entered by Kaz, 2005/10/25 |

clique » click

Classification: English – cross-language

Spotted in the wild:

  • The young girl who knows that she is the hottest thing in her click announces that they are leaving. She confidentially turns her back on them and walks away. (link)
  • Because of her intrigue for technology and enchantment of mythology, Cindy was noted in her click as The Teckie. (link)
  • Their group was very popular in school. Nancy was the youngest one Pam had ever accepted in her click. These were the cheerleaders and the glamour types. (link)

Clique’s etymology, according to OED.com:

[recent a. F. clique, not in Cotgr., but quoted by Littré of 15th c. in sense ‘noise, clicking sound’, f. cliquer to click, clack, clap. Littré says that in the modern sense it is originally the same as claque band of claqueurs. (This word has no derivative in French; in English it has originated many.)]

One of the entries for “click” is:

Anglicized form of CLIQUE (sense 1)..

This is hard because I’m not certain what this falls into exactly. The meaning that “clique” had in Old French is not far off from the primary meaningof “click” (via OED, yet again):

A slight, sharp, hard, non-ringing sound of concussion, thinner than a clack, such as is made by the dropping of a latch, the cocking of a gun, etc. Also fig.

Is this an eggcorn that the OED has documented by stating “Anglicized form of CLIQUE (sense 1)”, or what? I first noticed it on irc.perl.org#catalyst, and the search for “in his|her|your|my
|their click” came up with a lot of false positives. It does have a web presence, though (as the “Spotted in the Wild” show), but considering the information from OED and dictionary.com, I’m curious what others think.

[David Romano’s draft posted by CW, 2005/10/14. In my view this is one of those eggcorns that lead back in a circle to the original etymology. I suppose this usage of _click_ is derived from the idea that these are the people one “clicks” with. Which appears to be the actual origin of _clique,_ but it is unclear if the writers were aware of that.]

| 4 comments | link | entered by David Romano, 2005/10/14 |

fartlek » fartlick

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • That stated there are types of training that you can do at this point that will help you in the long run, the main being LT training and Fartlick training. (runnersworld.com forum)
  • I believe in Fartlick type training, I believe swimming doesn’t use enough it enough. (link)
  • I ran track in HS, and we used to do these things that sounded like “fartlick” - high speed dashes followed by a jog for a little, then back to the dash and then the jog - over and over and over. We used to giggle at the name though - now it makes sense! (link)
  • Three days later at the holloween run. I did an easy mile warm up then some fartlick type pick ups. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

AHD4 has the following entry for _fartlek_:

> 1. An athletic training technique, used especially in running, in which periods of intense effort alternate with periods of less strenuous effort in a continuous workout.
> 2. A workout using this technique.
>
> _[Swedish, speed play : fart, running, speed (from fara, to go, move, from Old Norse) + lek, play (from leka, to play, from Old Norse leika).]_

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/06/29 |