The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Tatterdemalion is a rare and rather dated word, used either as a noun referring to a person dressed in tattered clothing, or as a synonym for “tattered” or “ragged”. The OED does not seem to have any usage examples post-1900, but they do exist: some can be found in Dictionary.com’s recent “Word of the Day” entry.

The -demalion part of the word is obscure. AHD4 simply opts for “of unkown meaning”, whereas Dictionary.com adds “perhaps from Old French maillon, ‘long clothes, swadding clothes’ or Italian maglia, ‘undershirt’”; the OED calls it “a factitious element suggesting an ethnic or descriptive derivative”. Etymonline.com speculates about a possible reference to Tatars.

Spellings have varied. Again from the OED, 17th century cites have Tatter-de-mallian, tattertimallion, tatterdimallians, totterdemalions, Tatterdemalean and more. What is clear is that -demalion has nothing to do with medallion, except for being an almost-anagram and that however little sense tattermedallion makes, it offers at least more of a hook for interpretation than the original does. Maybe, as jorkel speculates in the Forum thread, a “tatter(ed) medallion” implies “a certain fall from grace”.

The recast form tattermedallion is by no means new. The columnist Will Self, twice cited here, appears to have a predilection for it (further cites from him exist). It also appears in a 1934 poem by Berton Braley on the buccaneer Henry Morgan:

This is the ballad of Henry Morgan /
Who troubled the sleep of the King of Spain /
With a frowsy, blowsy, lousy pack /
Of the water rats of the Spanish Main, /
Rakes and rogues and mad rapscallions /
Broken gentlemen, tattermedallions /
Scum and scourge of the hemisphere, /
Who looted the loot of the stately galleons, /
Led by Morgan, the Buccaneer.

Even much further back, Peter King in his book Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740-1820 (Google Books link to p. 162) quotes a 1748 correspondent of the Norwich Gazette writing about roads “lined with shoals of tattermedallions either begging relief with an air intimating that they will not be denied or boldly taking it pistol or cutlass in hand”.

An eggcorn with a long history, it appears.

Coal-hearted was first noted by our frequent contributor Ken Lakritz, who immediately pointed out the formal similarity to goal standard: deletion of the final consonant d, leading to a re-interpretation of the metaphor. A classic eggcorn.

This was, however, not the end. A year later, still in the Eggcorn forums, Peter Forster noted the curious expression (a hooker with a) heart of coal, which occurs in a reversal of the wide-spread cliché … with a heart of gold. Peter and our poster jorkel both supply numerous examples, and it is jorkel who links this image back to the eggcorn coal-hearted.

This reshaping was first posted briefly in the an Eggcorn forum post by Lisa in April 2007 and then fully documented and discussed 5 months later. The thread that developed contains some speculation (and bafflement) about the underlying image.

I imagine that if the animal reference doe remains obscure and is replaced with dough the idea might well be that of indistinct and not-yet-fully-formed softness, fitting with categories such as innocence and naivete.

The substitution of “up” for the opaque “ut” in utmost has been pointed out numerous times.

The Eggcorn Forum poster Russell analyses:

[The constituent “ut”] is liable to reanalysis to something that more transparently expresses superlative meaning, such as up+most (‘uppermost’), which fits with the MORE IS UP-type metaphor. This may also involve anticipatory assimilation to the nasal in “most”.

A Google search shows very large numbers of hits, from both sides of the Atlantic (and Australia, too). All the above cites are taken from searches restricted to news outlets, and most are very recent, which justifies the “nearly mainstream” classification.

This is a rather low-frequency eggcorn. The mixed form “social lepard” is found, too:

You didn’t know what you wanted to wear. Nothing from Hottopic though unless you wanted to be a social lepard. (link)

See also: social morays.