The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Suggested to me by Rachel Cristy, 13 August 2007. Earlier reports above.

Brians: “Midriff” derives from “mid-” and a very old word for the belly. Fashions which bare the belly expose the midriff. People think of the gap being created by scanty tops and bottoms as a rift, and mistakenly call it a “midrift” instead. In earlier centuries, before belly-baring was in, the midriff was also the piece of cloth which covered the area.

AMZ: It’s possible that this interpretation is encouraged by viewing the “midriff” pronunciation as the product of final t-deletion.

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.]

The first cite is in a New York Times Magazine article. Googling on “strum up support” gets you a fair number of cites having to do with music-making, but also some, like the ones above, that don’t.

I wouldn’t have thought that the idiom “drum up” was so opaque that re-shaping was called for or that the sense of “strum up” (vs. down) used with reference to playing musical instruments would be salient to obtaining a goal by persistent effort, but the examples are out there.

[Addendum: Doug Harris on ADS-L, 13 June 2007, attempting to rationalize the eggcorn (which he hadn’t heard before), writes that it “makes perfect sense if referring to the effort stringed-instrument-bearing buskers, flower children and the like do to allow them to continue the lifestyle they’ve chosen.”]

The Cupertino Effect has also produced several uses of “expedient growth”.

apprentice writes in her blog:

> Tuesday night I was at Poetry School, and a poem I’d written about a plantation of trees was really well received, which pleased me a lot […]
>
> But I was asked about a phrase I’d put in it, which was stalk-still, which I meant as a deliberate play on stock-still. People were interested in knowing if I had actually meant to do it. And I had, because I’d caught a programme on the BBC that relates to this site _[the Eggcorn Database]_ on eggcorns.

Most writers in the examples seem to have “still as a stalk” in mind, but the cite from the Tails of birding blog has a reference to stalking just a few lines before it employs the eggcorn: _Again we stalked carefully along the trail, using each opening in the marsh willows to search through the broken reeds._