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by-election » bi-election

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Note that when a politician leaves (or gets dismissed), there’s a bi-election for that seat rather than having someone appoint a new person (or one of their friends/family).” (E-mail from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky on 12 November 2004)
  • “No member for Stapenhill, awaiting bi-election …” (link)
  • “The management of flying foxes in suburban Katherine has emerged as a key issue in this weekends bi-election …” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Arnold Zwicky (The Fall Eggcorn Crop, on Language Log)

The first cite is from e-mail to Elizabeth Zwicky, about Australian electoral politics. On 19 August 2005, Google produced ca. 4,540 raw webhits. From countries that have by-elections, of course.

The semantics seems clear: a by-election is an extra election — so two elections (”bi”) where you’d expect only one. Most people find the “by” of “by-election” opaque.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/08/19 |

bow » bough

Chiefly in:   a shot over the bough

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “This is, basically, a shot over the bough,” the agent said, “which clearly indicates that the Players Association is onto MLB’s game.” (Jayson Stark's column on espn.com)
  • “Warning: I’m firing the first shot over the bough. On behalf of my clients, we’re going to vigorously defend the continuation and preservation of the very …” (link)
  • “Let this be a shot over the bough of all bicyclists. We’re watching you and we have cell phones. I’ll go as far as to warn you.” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Robert Coren (Newsgroup soc.motss posting of 20 November 2004)
  • Arnold Zwicky (The Fall Eggcorn Crop, on Language Log)

The first cite was supplied by Coren in his soc.motss posting.

Nautical expressions, like “(fire) a shot over the bow”, tend to be reshaped by the non-nautical, who will replace a mystifying specifically nautical term by a more familiar homophone, “bough” in this case.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/08/19 |

segue » segway

Classification: English – cross-language

Spotted in the wild:

  • Another segway into the introduction is to start it with a little anecdote (or story). (BookRags, How to Write a Five Paragraph Essay)
  • Overall, this little book offers much as a solid segway into intro Perl programming for bioinformatics. (link)
  • It was a small room, just next to the front desk. So, sometimes I’d catch a wink here or there and just drift off. This dream always segwayed into the next dream. (link)
  • A prior degree of knowledge of both wine and wine politics is needed to get the best out of this film, as otherwise the shaky hand-held camera work, flitting from language to language (with subtitles) and relentless segwaying of one story into another makes the “plot” difficult to follow. (wine-pages.com)
  • The second X-Files movie may or may not reveal straight undisputeable facts, but the last episode was still a great closer and segway into the movie, which I sure as hell can’t wait for. (allscifi forum, March 10, 2004)
  • The rest of the paragraph should be spent arguing this one point. Don’t segway into another point. You want coherent writing, not chaos. (Izzy's Guide to Starting & Running an Underground Paper)

Analyzed or reported by:

_Segway_ is a brand name for a motorized one-person stand-up vehicle reminiscent of a wheelchair or a lawn-mower. On the other hand, _segue_, a borrowing from Italian, means “move smoothly and unhesitatingly from one state, condition, situation, or element to another”, or, as a noun, denotes such a transition.

In some of the occurrences of the eggcorn, the (simpler) substitution of the semantically convincing _way_ for the obscure second syllable _-ue_ might be have happened. At the end of Mark Liberman’s article, Ben Zimmer and Rich Baldwin show that the change in spelling can be unrelated to and predate the motorized contraption.

| 4 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/08/18 |

landlubber » landlover, land lover

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Back Away From Me Loot Ya Land Lover! Pirate Treasure Surprise Jul 13 ‘03″ (link)
  • “Devised to pass the long hours at sea, our Captain’s Puzzles will keep even the land lover occupied.” (link)
  • “ARRRRRRRRRRRR! What about pirate talk, ye pansy landlover? Think of all the cool words pirates say, especially words essential to the English language.” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Ken Lakritz (link)
  • Brian Kane (On the newsgroup soc.motss, 15 August 2005)
  • Richard A. Strauss (link)

The “lubber” part of “landlubber” is opaque, which makes it ripe for reshaping into the more sensible “lover”. It’s hard to know how frequent this eggcorn is, since “land lover” and “landlover” have many literal occurrences, with the meaning ’someone who loves (the) land’.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/08/17 |

renowned » reknowned

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Reknowned Neo-Nazi activist held in Blount County jail. (link)

Stemming from ‘know(n)’.
There are also a small number of Google hits for ‘reknowed’.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Sravana Reddy, 2005/08/17 |
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