The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

In her Boston Globe column _The Word_ of October 9, 2005, Jan Freeman reflects on what Arnold Zwicky has called the Recency Illusion: the idea that if you’ve noticed some non-standard or uncommon bit of language only recently, you believe that it in fact originated recently (see Arnold Zwicky’s Language Log articles here and here). As an example, she quotes a particular understanding of _shuffle off this mortal coil_, which is in effect a hidden eggcorn:

> The bait was a quotation, in a New York Times book review, from Greg Critser’s “Generation Rx,” saying that pharmaceuticals now promise “everything from guarding us against our excesses of drink, food and tobacco … to extending our very time on this mortal coil.”
>
> “On this mortal coil?” But when Hamlet speculates about having “shuffled off this mortal coil,” in what must be Shakespeare’s most-quoted speech, we all know he’s not talking about a Savion Glover move-don’t we? “Shuffle off” means “get rid of, dispose of,” says the OED, and “mortal coil” means “the bustle or turmoil of this mortal life.”
>
> So was Critser’s misunderstanding a new one? Of course not. To judge by Google hits, hundreds of people think “shuffling off this mortal coil” involves going somewhere on foot. Even in edited sources, people have been getting it wrong for nearly 20 years.

The eggcorn relies on an interpretation of _shuffle_ as “move or walk in a sliding dragging manner without lifting the feet” (Where did he shuffle? Off this mortal coil.) instead of the verb-plus-particle _shuffle off_ “get rid of, dispose of” (What did he shuffle off? This mortal coil.)

For hidden eggcorns, which do not involve a change in spelling, we often need indirect evidence of the writers’ understanding of the expressions they use. This can come in the form of examples that use _on and off this mortal coil_, the double preposition _off of_, or synonyms of _shuffle_, such as in the following examples:

* I suppose if I had to stagger off of this mortal coil, “beer potomania” wouldn’t be such a bad way to go (compared to most of the other diseases in this book). (Amazon book review)
* Tell me something - does he get to sleep with Elizabeth Shue before he lurches off this mortal coil? (Barry Glendenning, Guardian Unlimited Football, June 20, 2004 )
* There are numerous surveys that suggest that women who live alone spend their time skipping gaily through the tulips and sipping at crystal streams of joie de vivre until they eventually slip off this mortal coil with a gentle sigh of satisfaction between snow-white linen sheets, while men forget how to wash, walk and talk and are eventually killed by MRSA from their own underpants and expire in a sticky heap of jazz mags and burger buns. (Lucy Mangan, Guardian Unlimited, March 2, 2005)

Arnold Zwicky quotes an e-mail from Keith Ivey:

> When I first heard the phrase “the die is cast”, I thought it meant that a mold for stamping out coins (for example) had already been produced from molten metal and thus set and could not be changed. I later learned that it referred to throwing a gaming cube. Apparently I’m not alone in having had this misapprehension.

He quotes a web site, supplied by Keith Ivey, too, on which someone states the same conviction about the expression’s origin and meaning:

> Perhaps you have heard the phrase ‘the die is cast’ or ‘the die has been cast’. This has nothing to do with gambling or dice; instead, it refers to a mold (die) which has been cast (made).
>
> Once the mold is made, everything which comes from it, will have the shape of the mold. ‘The die is cast’ thus states that a pattern has been laid down, and thus subsequent events will conform to the pattern. This phrase lends itself to assumptions about the future being predictable, once patterns are seen in the present.

It is easy to find other writers being unsure about this point:

> The Phrase Finder lists the origin of ‘The die has been cast’ as: ‘The die here is a dice. Julius Caesar is supposed to have said this when crossing the Rubicon.’
>
> However, my understanding was that ‘die’ in this case refers to the die used for forming material, and that ‘cast’ here does not mean ‘throw’ but rather ‘to form (molten metal etc.) into a particular shape by pouring into a mold’. So basically once the metal has been poured into the die it will set pretty quickly, and the shape (outcome) will be fixed. (link)

“Hidden” eggcorns are, in their most basic form, reanalyses of the meaning of a word or expression without any change in spelling. This lack of orthographic evidence makes it harder to find indisputable examples. It is quite possible that the authors of the two occurrences that are listed above were aware of the origin of the idiom and just decided to play on the words: we can’t know what they thought. It is, on the other hand, clear that, given the amount of uncertainty about the expression’s origin, genuine hidden eggcorn examples of _the die is cast_ must be out there.

See also _the dye is cast_.

Linda Seebach found the following passage in a letter to the editor (it was changed before publication):

> The pulse of social change is with the News on this one, but you’re too busy fending off the political/economic pinchers of the conservative bug to realize it.

A pincher is someone who pinches. For some people, it’s also, quite reasonably, something that pinches.

Just like the verb _wash_, _leach_ is semantically quite versatile: A contaminant can leach out of the soil (or into the water supply), the soil can leach a contaminant into the water, or water can leach a contaminant out of the soil. The substitution _leach»leech_ occurs for all three cases and is not uncommon.

There is probably an influence of _leech_ in peer-to-peer file sharing. The noun _leech_, metaphorically formed from the blood-sucking animal, designates someone who downloads other file sharers’ offerings without sharing their own files — a strategy that is used to avoid attracting attention of the police, if the file-sharing infringes copyright; in some countries, downloading is or used to be legal when uploading one’s own copyright-protected files isn’t. A verb _leech_ was formed, which is used more often intransitively (”He/she is leeching.”), but also occurs as a transitive verb (”I leeched the file from …”). With technologies that make asymmetric file-sharing impossible, _leech_ is used as an informal synonym of _download_.

In some examples where traditionally _leach_ would be expected, it is hard to tell if the underlying image is that of washing or sucking:

* It soon becomes obvious to the reader that the house is leeching the life out of its occupants, while in the process of revivifying itself. (Amazon customer review)
* Sven Birkerts believes that technology is leeching the spiritual out of human experience. (Wired Magazine, May 1995)

Similar in the example reported by Linda Seebach, from a column by George Will about the EU constitution:

* But whatever the reasons, the result will be salutary because the constitution would accelerate the leeching away of each nation’s sovereignty. (The text appeared in several publications, among others the _Wall Street Journal_ and the _Washington Post_, at the end of May 2005; other sites have quoted the relevant passage.)

Will Rigby reported seeing “There’s a fair few maybes being branded about” in the subtitles of the opening episode of
the two-part film “Class of ‘76″.

The eggcorn doesn’t work for all grammatical usages of _bandy about_: The final /i/ sound has to be present in the eggcorn. _Branded about_, most of the time as a passive, yields several hundred occurrences on the web. The past tense or the -ing form _branding about_ are less frequent.

The connection appears to be the idea of giving something prominence, just as brand names do for products.

See also bantied about.