The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

This one can’t be a simple spelling error, since it replaces the incredibly frequent “night” with the much more specialized “knight”. Apparently the function of knights as guardians and protectors comes to the fore in this reshaping. What lets this work is that the function of the prefix “be-” has become opaque.

The fact that the “wether” in “bellwether” refers to a castrated ram (which leads the flock) is lost to almost everybody these days (few of us are farm folk), so the word is open for reinterpretation. And, goodness knows, people have reinterpreted the word in favor of “weather” (raw Google webhits: ca. 17,600 on 20 August 2005 — vs. ca. 662,000 for “bellwether”). “Weather” is connected with prediction, so the semantic shift is unsurprising.

Several people — most recently, Ann Burlingham — have suggested “wrangle an invitation” to me as an eggcorn for “wangle an invitation”. The idea is that “wangle” is not a very common word, in fact a much less common word than “wrangle” (which gets considerable press in cowboy-related contexts, including Wrangler jeans). Entirely plausible (and consonant with my own impressions), though the history turns out to be much more complex than that.

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“Load” is a great deal more familiar than “lode”, and the mother lode contains loads of (’lots of’) stuff, so the reinterpretation is understandable.

There are also some cites with “motherload” reinterpreted as ‘a mother of a load, a huge load’: “Protect your computer from a motherload of viruses, spyware Web site, company offer free ways to protect PC…” (link)

Jess Anderson suggested on the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss (20 August 2005) that “whorefrost” might occur as an eggcorn. After all, the “hoar” of “hoarfrost” is opaque. I found a few examples that appear to be genuine (some are plays on words), but these could be simple spelling errors. On the other hand, the ‘bad woman’ connotation of “whore” might be vivid to some people, who take hoarfrost to be a nasty force of nature.