The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

When a ship is awash with water and unable to manoeuvre normally, it is said to founder. Perhaps because flounders are fish in the same seas as the ships, it’s almost more common to refer to a ship, today, as floundering than foundering.

In fact, in one of the references added here, flounder is actually given as a vocabulary word, erroneously defined as a boat awash in the sea.

Addendum/edit by CW, 2005/10/25: The substitution _founder/flounder_ (in both direction) has been submitted to the Eggcorn database several times and is discussed by Paul Brians and the American Heritage Book of English Usage. It is, however, not an eggcorn. The two verbs are phonologically and semantically similar, but it is unclear that one is being reanalyzed in terms of the other. An eggcorn requires that someone has understood the sense and spelling of word they actually employ, but not the word that is conventionally used in that particular case. See also Arnold Zwicky’s discussion of _flout»flaunt_ (also not an eggcorn).

Addendum/edit by AZ, 2005/10/26: Harsh, Chris, harsh. In fact, some people have explained to me that “flounder” is the word to use, because a ship in this sort of distress flops about like a fish — a flounder, in particular — out of water. The association with flounder (the fish) seems to be unetymological: OED2 labels it “of obscure etymology”, suggests various non-fishy sources, and gives as its earliest sense the not particularly fish-related ’stumble’ (attested from 1592). But then the sense extended to ’struggle violently and clumsily, struggle in mire’ and the way was open for comparison to a flopping flounder. (Suspiciously, several of the OED2’s citations actually mention fish.) In any case, “flounder, founder” is a great favorite of usage advisers: there’s a MWDEU entry with references to earlier writers, and most of the recent usage dictionaries have an entry — Bryson, Burchfield, Fiske, Garner, O’Conner, and Steinmann & Keller, in addition to Brians and the American Heritage folks. Of these authorities, only Steinmann & Keller (Good Grammar Made Easy, 1999, p. 140) seem to make the fish connection, but they still tell you not to use “flounder” for sinking vessels: “flounder, founder Sometimes confused. To flounder is what a fish (the flounder, for example) does out of water (move clumsily); figuratively, to be active without accomplishing anything. To founder is to sink because full of water: figuratively, to fail.”

Google stats:

“perspective students” - 118000
“prospective students” - 124000000

“perspective employer” - 12800
“prospective employer” - 1990000

If it is a reanalysis, the second occurrence quote might give a hint… prospectives looking at the position from their perspective.

This astonishing reanalysis was just suggested by Wes Munsil, who “wonders what mental model this usage reflects”. Indeed. It’s not even that rare.

ADDENDUM, following orionrobots’ question in the comments.

The eggcorn is puzzling: Most of our collection involve not more than a misunderstood lexical item, or maybe change morphemes or function words. This one, though, takes a rare but perfectly normal transitive verb and creates a) a predicative structure “(it would) be X”; b) an indirect question “who of (you, them, us …)”, which takes the place of the predicative complement X; c) the preposition “of”, which takes what would have been the complement of “behoove” as an argument. The result is grammatical. “Who of me” doesn’t seem to make much sense, but I’ll come to that later.

There are of course irrelevant (non-eggcorn) examples of this:

* We are waging a presidential election in this country at this very moment, the major issue of which seems to be who of these two men is the greatest warrior? (link)

For “would be who of”, the eggcorn takes over, but some examples are still perfectly commonplace:

* An interesting one would be who of our players has consistently failed against the Kangaroos (under Pagan). (link)

Here’s an example I didn’t include — I think it is the eggcorn, but maybe the passage shows how it might have arisen: imagine the question being asked provocatively: “Who of you would consider it?! Well, you should.”

* I have compassion for the plight of those who’re suffering in the hell hole that is New Orleans. But I have very little sympathy. From this time forward, when you’re advised about a “mandatory evacuation,” it would be who of you to consider it, especially if you want any moral consideration of your “Monday Morning Quarterbacking” after the emergency.(link)

For “it would be who of me to [do something]” to make sense, the new structure must have crystallized into an idiom for some speakers. I nearly wrote that it would be unlikely to find eggcornified “it behooves you”, but digging a little further…

* The doctor doesn’t know the Mafia’s choice, so it is who of him/her to protect valuable townspeople and hope the others do not get shot. If somebody asks and you are the doctor, you MUST say so.(Google cache link, from the description of a role playing game)
* This is also why I try to stay current on what the afroementioned nine wise in Washington do. Their case law changes all the time, and it is who of us to keep abreast. That is good civics. (link)

After Ken Rudolph supplied the first cite above, I googled up lots of “X magnet” ‘X tycoon’ examples, for X = shipping, newspaper, mining, textile, oil, publishing, business, real estate, liquor, automobile, fashion. Undoubtedly there are more.

There are also many occurrences of “X magnet” referring to something, someplace, or someone that attracts X. This is a possible
contribution to the replacement of the rare “magnate” ‘tycoon’ by the much more common “magnet”: an X magnate is someone who attracts X business(es) to himself (or, much more rarely, herself).

Unfortunately, as Jed Davis pointed out on soc.motss on 17 October 2005, there are also hundreds of references to “magnate schools” (for “magnet schools”), which suggests that MWDEU might be right in thinking that there is just a spelling confusion here. Not (yet) in Brians, for what that’s worth. In any case, I’ve labeled it as questionable.