behoove » be who of

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • It would be who of us all to stand behind our great leader in this tough time of war. (FreeAdvice forums)
  • Phillips told the council members she felt it would “be who of us to try to do this.” (Sand Mountain Reporter, November 13, 2003)
  • As for patches, who knows, but I think it would be who of any game company to recall a game with major bugs and replace it rather than require a patch to be downloaded, especially on a fixed hardware setup. (Sharky Games forum, January 16, 2001)
  • Doing a little more research online, I found out that it would be who of me to get service pack 2. (Tech Support Guy forum, March 1, 2005)
  • Elementary school is the grade level in which I will be looking into and I felt that it would be who of me to learn a little about Elementary Schools before I start talking about certain topics like bullying. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

This astonishing reanalysis was just suggested by Wes Munsil, who “wonders what mental model this usage reflects”. Indeed. It’s not even that rare.

ADDENDUM, following orionrobots’ question in the comments.

The eggcorn is puzzling: Most of our collection involve not more than a misunderstood lexical item, or maybe change morphemes or function words. This one, though, takes a rare but perfectly normal transitive verb and creates a) a predicative structure “(it would) be X”; b) an indirect question “who of (you, them, us …)”, which takes the place of the predicative complement X; c) the preposition “of”, which takes what would have been the complement of “behoove” as an argument. The result is grammatical. “Who of me” doesn’t seem to make much sense, but I’ll come to that later.

There are of course irrelevant (non-eggcorn) examples of this:

* We are waging a presidential election in this country at this very moment, the major issue of which seems to be who of these two men is the greatest warrior? (link)

For “would be who of”, the eggcorn takes over, but some examples are still perfectly commonplace:

* An interesting one would be who of our players has consistently failed against the Kangaroos (under Pagan). (link)

Here’s an example I didn’t include — I think it is the eggcorn, but maybe the passage shows how it might have arisen: imagine the question being asked provocatively: “Who of you would consider it?! Well, you should.”

* I have compassion for the plight of those who’re suffering in the hell hole that is New Orleans. But I have very little sympathy. From this time forward, when you’re advised about a “mandatory evacuation,” it would be who of you to consider it, especially if you want any moral consideration of your “Monday Morning Quarterbacking” after the emergency.(link)

For “it would be who of me to [do something]” to make sense, the new structure must have crystallized into an idiom for some speakers. I nearly wrote that it would be unlikely to find eggcornified “it behooves you”, but digging a little further…

* The doctor doesn’t know the Mafia’s choice, so it is who of him/her to protect valuable townspeople and hope the others do not get shot. If somebody asks and you are the doctor, you MUST say so.(Google cache link, from the description of a role playing game)
* This is also why I try to stay current on what the afroementioned nine wise in Washington do. Their case law changes all the time, and it is who of us to keep abreast. That is good civics. (link)

| 8 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/10/20 |

boot(-)strap » boots-trap

Classification: English – resyllabification

Spotted in the wild:

  • Germans have the strength and the will to pull themselves out of a crisis by their own boots-traps, if only they believe themselves capable of doing so. (Address by German President Roman Herzog, Apr. 26, 1997)
  • The information for notification group defines the set of objects to generate SNMPv2-Trap-PDU’s. The well-known traps group defines the set of well-known boots-traps. (Raj Jain, "Network Monitoring Fundamentals and Standards", Aug. 14, 1997)
  • One would run into a trapped, self-referential problem if the “test” result were scrutinized in the same way as normally done with an external measurement equipment where a prediction value is acquired to estimate the validity of the result. No wonder that algorithms of the iterated Bayesean type are called “boots-trapping methods” and associated with hermeneutics. (Hans H. Diebner, "Dasein's Edge on its Description", Nov. 21, 2004)
  • Quantified gene expression levels were subjected to several supervised and unsupervised bio-informatics analyses and boots-trapping procedures to determine differences or degree of similarity between matching pairs of one patient. (San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium Abstracts, Dec. 8, 2004)
  • After boots-trapping the start-up of the JXTA platform, for which there are two options, the GUI application will want to instantiate one instance of the net.jxta.instantp2p.PeerGroupManager class. (JXTA Demonstration GUI)

Some examples make an explicit link to “traps” or “trapping.” Appears to be a common reinterpretation among German writers using technical English.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/08/11 |

precedent » president

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “The designs created by him and his colleagues set a president in Victorian style.” (Artist Biographies)
  • “That case set a president in custody cases.” (link)

‘President’ is obviously seen as a word with connotations of importance… so ‘to set a precedent’, something would have to be important, or would at least be so after it was deemed a precedent, like a president. Also, perhaps, a reanalysis deriving from ‘presides.’

| Comments Off link | entered by Sravana Reddy, 2005/03/26 |

throes » throws

Chiefly in:   throws of passion , death throws

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Indeed, even if an identified mass does have eight limbs it still may not be an octopus - it could be that you have happened upon a couple in the throws of passion or an amputee five-a-side football team. (The Octopus - Its Role and Identification in Society)
  • Ok, granted, I’m still in the orgasmic throws of those magical first 5 or 6 listens of a solidly great album, but discovering Barafundle is one of the best things to happen to me this year. (Amazon.com customer review)
  • This is a story that focuses on one family who find themselves in the throws of an alien invasion of earth with one intent: total extermination of mankind. (Truckblog movie review)
  • Joseph Califano, Jr., chairman of the National Center on Addiction & Substance Abuse, said, “Our Nation is in the throws of an epidemic, of controlled prescription drug abuse and addiction.” (Capital News)
  • Well, I think we want to tune it, but I can guess what the President is going to say…”Blah blah blah, we’re winning, blah, insurgency is in death throws, blah, our troops moral is great blah, Good night and God Bless America.” (americasdebate.com)
  • I don’t like goup sex. I can barely stand one person seeing me sweaty and uttering ridiculous phrases in the throws of passion, let alone an audience. (link)
  • This is the autobiographical equivalent of the back of a cereal packet but none the less brings a rather unique insight into the death throws of a government. (Amazon.com, customer review)

‘Throw’ seeming to have something to do with passionate or violent action.

[CW, 2005/09/11: Entry updated.]

| 3 comments | link | entered by Sravana Reddy, 2005/03/21 |

rein » reign

Chiefly in:   take the reigns of power , free reign , reign in

Classification: English – nearly mainstream

Spotted in the wild:

  • The excesses of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero bled the imperial treasury, as the generals eventually grabbed the reigns of power. (The Moscow News, N 49 2004)
  • Following the 1984 general election, despite a landslide Labour victory, the outgoing National Prime Minister demonstrated a remarkable unwillingness to hand over the reigns of power. (Auckland District Law Society)
  • Free Reign for the Sole Superpower? (Boston Review article title)
  • The Muslim Council of Britain intend to seek immediate clarification from the government that expressions of support for Muslims overseas, such as Palestinians or the Chechens, would not be banned.
    However, Lord Falconer seemed to suggest that the law was being specifically drafted to reign in key individuals. “I think we know who we want to target in relation to this,” he said. (The Sunday Herald, Aug 7, 2005)
  • So eagerly anticipated is the annual game of “who’s minding the shop?” while the prime minister takes his August break, that this year the Sun published a “Prescott countdown” to the dreaded day when the deputy prime minister would take up the reigns of power - and, theoretically, have his finger on the button. (Guardian Unlimited, Matthew Tempest, Aug 13, 2002)
  • And yet we hear little about the aftermath of war in Iraq. Speculation abroad is rife. Will we seize Iraq’s oil fields? To whom do we hand the reigns of power after Saddam Hussein? Will our war result in attacks on Israel? (Guardian Unlimited, Robert Byrd, Feb 18, 2003)
  • As one imam put it to me: “Why has the Muslim community failed in reigning in their own youth and shaping their future? Why have the mosques failed to provide rigorous leadership? We must acknowledge our failure.” (Guardian Unlimited, Madeleine Bunting, July 14, 2005)
  • Born in rural Limpopo, Hlahla took over the reigns at Acsa in November 2001. She has been credited with the successful realigning of the company’s strategic direction, resulting in improved earnings and an accelerated and intensified transformation process. (Independent Online (South Africa), August 03, 2005)
  • Does anyone remember “Professor” Ward Churchill? Yet, each time “we the people” have attempted to pull the reigns in on these seditious individuals, the ACLU has grabbed them from us; only to warn us that if we attempt to stop these terrorists or terrorists-in-the-making, they will sue us. (The Conservative Voice, August 07, 2005)
  • The Roman Empire stood appalled:
    It dropped the reigns of peace and war (William Butler Yeats, lines 13-14 of "Two Songs from a Play", the play being "The Resurrection", 1931)

Analyzed or reported by:

Lee Rudolph contributed the example from Yeats on soc.motss. He explains:

> The eggcorn is present in the 1953 fifth printing of the first edition of the 1933 Collected
Poems, but not in the 1953 New Edition of the 1934 Collected Plays, and has been corrected without comment in the 1983 Collected Poems: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran,
whose stated intention in the preface is “to provide accurate texts”. I don’t know if we can assume it was a printer’s error, but there it is, big as life and twice as natural, and something between 74 and 52 years old.

As horses and carriages have become rare as a means of transport, the metaphor controling or restricting their movement with the help of reins has lost its transparency. The homophone _reign_, in the sense of the exercise of power, is in the process of supplanting it.

The thoroughness of the re-interpretation in the occurrences of the _rein_ > _reign_ substitution varies. _Free reign_ is entering mainstream usage. _Reigns of power_, on the other hand, only makes sense superficially; the plural remains unaccounted for.

See also [_reign»rain_](eggcorns.lascribe.net/eng…) (as in _rain supreme_), [_rain»reign_](eggcorns.lascribe.net/eng…) (as in _right as reign_) and rein»range .

[Update: 18 October 2007, Ben Zimmer] More about free rei(g)n on OUPblog here and here.

| 3 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2004/12/23 |
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