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wing » wink

Chiefly in:   on a wink and a prayer

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • What about the cables? Do they plug in properly or is the connection made on a wink and a prayer? (link)
  • All these diseases, operations, medications, and endoscopic surgeries can be stopped in a wink and a prayer simply by removing the cause. (link)
  • The Chicago KIngs were founded on a wink and a prayer by four enterprising young dykes in February 2001. (link)
  • “I want this to be the kind of team that tries to make things happen,” he said. “It was kind of a wink-and-a-prayer sort of thing. We thought we’d give it a whirl and it kicked us in the tail.” (Little Falls Times)

Analyzed or reported by:

The original metaphor, referring to the hazards of aviation, has become so obscure that several variants are now in circulation, with slightly different connotations. See also on _a whim and a prayer_.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/07/03 |

roll » role

Chiefly in:   role call

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Unsure of the condition of my men, I ordered a role call. (link)
  • The Role Call of Faith from Hebrews 11 listed the individuals who took action that demonstrated their faith. (link)
  • Take attendance: role call, clipboard, sign in, seating chart. (link)

It is possible to equate ‘role’ with ‘duty’, and since ‘roll call’ is mostly used in a military context, there could be some semantic association being made with soldiers’ “roles” in battle. It’s particularly transparent in the second quote above — the individual choosing to take on a role that displays faithfulness. But I’m not sure how much of an eggcorn it is in the classroom context — any ideas?

| 1 comment | link | entered by Sravana Reddy, 2005/07/02 |

courtesy » curtsey

Chiefly in:   curtsey of , curtsey call

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Another version of the above counter or vessel style sink. (photo curtsey of customer).” (link)
  • “Colour Mixing with Effetre (Moretti) curtsey of Kay Powell.” (link)
  • “Our Daily Screenshot comes to us curtsey of Baja’s Knights of Steel. In today’s image we see…” (link)
  • “…could stoop no lower in his career of selling out the land of his birth and the cause of his Protestant forefathers, he pays a curtsey call on the Pope…” (link)

The politeness of the curtsey as a gesture probably accounts for “courtesy” >> “curtsey”. “Curtsey of” in attributions of sources, as in the first three cites, is reasonably frequent — about 4,000 Google webhits on 1 July 2005 (as against about 26,000,000 for “courtesy of”) — while “curtsey call” is much less frequent (ca. 100 webhits) and is mostly confined to sources in Africa and South Asia, though the cite above is from a source in Northern Ireland.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/07/01 |

wholesale » whole-scale

Variant(s):  wholescale, whole scale

Classification: English – nearly mainstream

Spotted in the wild:

  • In exchange for steep tariff reductions and whole-scale reforms of the Chinese trading system, the United States gives up nothing. (House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing, May 3, 2000)
  • The NACB has called on the government to scrap prescription charges or institute a whole scale reform of the charging system to make sure the poor are not penalised by pricing the pre-payment certificates on a sliding scale. (BBC, July 3, 2001)
  • Shifting the FBI’s focus from criminal prosecution to prevention of future terrorist attacks makes sense, but Congress has a constitutional responsibility to carefully review any whole-scale changes of our federal law enforcement capabilities. (Congressman Frank R. Wolf press release, June 5, 2002)
  • Although minor changes in protein conformation have been observed in crystals, for example, a localized pocket in carbonmonoxy myoglobin (Zhu et al. 1992), to the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of whole-scale changes in secondary structure. (Protein Science, May 2004)

Analyzed or reported by:

This is common enough to receive an entry in the _Oxford English Dictionary_, with citations back to 1960:

wholescale, a.

[f. WHOLE a. + SCALE n.3, influenced by WHOLESALE n., a., adv.]

= WHOLESALE a. 5. Cf. full-scale.


1960 B. BERGONZI in F. Kermode Living Milton x. 168 Leavis’s case..is not a mere critical reappraisal of Milton, but a whole-scale demolition. [etc.]

It’s not surprising that as _wholesale_ moves away from its original mercantile usage to a more figurative sense of extensiveness, the _-sale_ element would be reinterpreted as _-scale_ to match _full-scale_, _large-scale_, _broad-scale_, etc.

| Comments Off link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/07/01 |
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