palm » pawn

Chiefly in:   pawn off (on)

Classification: English – nearly mainstream

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Audiences, too, may have recoiled when they watched the first episode [of ‘John from Cincinnati’], and thought, Hey, don’t try to pawn this off on me.” (New Yorker of 25 June 2007, p. 96)
  • “No matter how hard you try, attempting to pawn off your prejudicial thought patterns as anything remotely factual does not work.” (link)
  • “This idea to privatize Social Security is the biggest scam the govt. has ever tried to pawn off on us.” (link)

Philip Jensen sent me the New Yorker quotation (from Nancy Franklin) by e-mail on 22 June 2007; a discussion then ensued on the American Dialect Society mailing list. A few days earlier, on 19 June, the Grammarphobia site coped with a complaint from a reader about this very expression: “One of my pet peeves is hearing people say “pawn off” when they mean “palm off.” Why do they say that?”

The most recent OED (December 2005 draft revision) has no usage note on the relevant subentry for “pawn”. It gives early cites (1763, 1787) for “pawn upon” — the first cite for “palm off (on/upon)” is from 1832 — and then cites (mostly from elevated sources) through 2003. MWDEU says the expression “would appear to have originated by similarity of sound to palm in palm off… but it may in fact be a dialectal variant.”

It turns out that OED1 and OED2 had an “Erron.” label on this usage, but that label has now been removed, presumably in recognition of the fact that, as we say here on the ecdb, the usage is “nearly mainstream”. Nevertheless, Paul Brians treats it as a straightforward error. (And Bryan Garner doesn’t mention it at all.)

Obviously, “pawn off” still rubs some people the wrong way, but there are others (like me) who don’t even notice it as worthy of comment.

[Thanks to Ben Zimmer and Jesse Sheidlower for supplying most of the information above.]

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2007/06/23 |

knickers » nipples

Chiefly in:   get one's nipples in a twist

Classification: English – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • “You won’t get your nipples in a twist over our choice this month — there’s no debate how great this one is!” (link)
  • “Just don’t expect me to get my nipples in a twist over your caterwauling about some architecture.” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Michael Palmer (Usenet group soc.motss, 10 April 2006.)

Palmer pointed out a poster’s use of “Go on, get your nipples in a twist” earlier that day, adding that “Google(tm) provides 389 hits, as against 193,000 for the standard knickers (also, 1,430 for nickers, 79 for snickers, 154 for knockers, and 19 for niggers).” The (primarily) British idiom is undoubtedly opaque to American speakers unfamiliar with “knickers” ‘underpants’, and “nipples”, which is phonetically very close to “knickers”, makes some (painful) sense.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2006/05/15 |

undue » undo

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “The perception of undo influence concerns Nils Jensen.” (link)
  • “Section 1194.4 defines undo burden as “significant difficulty or expense” … computer forensic investigator would cause undo burden on that agency …” (link)
  • “I still believe in the hand-in-hand concepts of separation of church and state and absolute freedom to worship, in the rights of the states to govern themselves without undo federal interference, and in the host of other things that defined me as a Republican.” (The Register Guard, June 26, 2005)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • commenter Doug Orleans (link)

The reverse of “do” >> “due” in “make due”, and, like it, probably dependent on a homophony between “do” and “due”, but (as commenter Doug Orleans notes) more likely to be just a spelling error, since it’s hard to see any semantic contribution from “do”. Now (as of 13 July 2005) Chris Waigl notes some semantic support for the reanalysis: “undo influence” might be seen as destructive, or leading to the disintegration (that is, undoing) of something.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/05/07 |

ringer » wringer

Chiefly in:   dead wringer

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • At 46, Feeley is a dead wringer for Henry Winkler, but speaks with the controlled growl of Clint Eastwood. (Philadelphia Business Journal)
  • Highly dramatic and darkly pretty, Palmer’s voice is a dead wringer for Tori Amos’s. (NY Rock Confidential)
  • Benigni plays a simple guy who ends up being a dead wringer for a local gangster. (Epinions.com)

This eggcorn shows the flip side of “(put through the) ringer.” The original expression “dead ringer” is quite opaque (”ringer” in the relevant sense originally referred to a horse “fraudulently substituted for another” in a race (OED), apparently in an allusion to “ringing the changes” on bells), so it is not surprising to find some confusion here with the homophonous “wringer.”

| Comments Off link | entered by Q. Pheevr, 2005/02/17 |