The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Rich Baldwin, in e-mail on 21 January 2005, supplies the following Google results:

“sow(ing) * wild oats”: ~15,200 ghits (5,760 ghits)

“sew(ing) * wild oats”: ~850 ghits (465 ghits)

“sow(ing) * wild oates”: ~50 ghits (77 ghits)

“soak(ing) * wild oats”: 3 ghits (2 ghits)

The middle two are probably just spelling errors.

…Is this the birth of a new eggcorn?

—–

[I responded] hard to say. it does replace a pretty rare word with a much more common one, but i don’t see any real improvement in sense. maybe the rare > common change is sufficient, though.

—–

[And he replied] I agree with you about the sense: I don’t think “soak” holds a better meaning than “sow”. Note that the word “sow” referred to in the phrase is no longer in everyday use. I would bet that everyone who uses “soak his wild oats” thinks only of “needle and thread” upon hearing “sow”. The original word is gone except in the phrase in question, while there is a commonly used homonym attracting attention elsewhere. Contrast, for example, what happened to “broadcast”; the word is still used, but changed to denote television signals, not seeds.

Therefore “sow his wild oats” sounds confusing, while “soak…” less so. We are left with an eggcorn that is not a more comfortable phrase, just a less uncomfortable one.

I brought this to your attention because the ghit number was so small. (Just checked again. Score is now 4 / 2. Go team!) I thought it interesting to see the documented start of an eggcorn.

From a posting to ADS-L by Jim Landau on 23 January 2005:

While in the Bronx Help Center on Friday, I brought up the topic of a storm. [And got the response above.]

MWCD10 has “skeletal” as meaning “…resembling a skeleton” so presumably the staff was stranded for days with no food and when rescued were down to skin and bones.

—–

Possibly just a (natural) extension of the meaning of “skeletal” to cover the same metaphorical territory as “skeleton” in “skeleton staff”. Or possibly a Fay-Cutler malapropism.

Presumably with stress on the second syllable, so a result of intervocalic flapping neutralizing /t/ and /d/, represented in spelling by a “d”. Still, the “pedal” element might be a move towards something having to do with feet.

On 28 November 2004 I got 720 (raw, unexamined) Google web hits for “centripedal”, as against 6,260 for “centrifical” (q.v.) in place of “centrifugal”.

From Michael Quinion in e-mail, 28 November 2004: A question came up in the World Wide Words newsletter this weekend about the fictitious word “centrifical”. Would I be right to consider this an example of an “eggcorn”?

—–

Maybe yes, maybe no. Looks like a reshaping of “centrifugal” so that it has a morphological analysis that makes more sense, or at least looks and sounds more familiar: centrif-ic-al. That would be a (subtle) eggcorning in derivational morphology.

See also “centripedal” (for “centripetal”).

Not in MWDEU or Brians’s list, but Quinion noted in e-mail on 29 November:

—–

It is very common. In my reply to the questioner I said:

Google turned up 3000 examples. A newspaper search found hundreds of others, the oldest being from the Manitoba Daily Free Press of 11 October 1879. An obituary in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in February 2003 credited its subject with a book entitled Power Your Golf Swing With Centrifical Force, which would be a trick worth watching. Air-conditioning engineers seem particularly fond of it - I found many references to devices called centrifical chillers.

From Estel Telcontar in e-mail, 28 November 2004, from his brother at age 13:

A group that he is in recently won a medal, and in conversation with him, I discovered that he thought “medal” and “metal” were the same word, and that the award was so named because it was made of metal.

—–

[One of a large number of cases that turn on intervocalic flapping and the neutralization of /t/ and /d/. Often this merely yields a non-standard spelling, but sometimes that spelling can be rationalized.]