The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

The “hammer” part of “hammer and tongs” (most often in “go hammer and tongs” or “go at it hammer and tongs”) is clear enough, but for people these days, most of us removed from any experience of blacksmithing, the “tongs” part is baffling. So some of us have rationalized the expression as involving “thongs” ‘whips’, that is, as referring to two sorts of weapons or instruments of punishment that might be used in agonistic confrontations. This one seems extremely unlikely to have arisen as a typo, and not very likely to have arisen through mishearing.

A hundred or so relevant google webhits (on 30 December 2005), mostly in the domains where agonistic confrontations are routine: sports and politics. There are some other hits deliberately playing with “thongs” as the name of an article of apparel.

I first heard this from an interviewee on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition on 30 December 2005.

One of the simple pleasures of Italian home-style cooking is the style of fricasseeing meat — most often chicken, though other meats can be treated in the same way — called, in Italian, alla cacciatora ‘hunter’s style’ or cacciatore or cacciatora (in French, chasseur). In food writing in English, cacciatore seems to be the most common variant, and there’s an alternative spelling cacciatori, in which the common pronunciation of word-final unaccented -e as /i/ in English is carried over into the spelling.

But four other spellings are not infrequent in English, and all involve the reshaping of the first syllable as catch; the spellings vary in how the medial unaccented vowel is spelled (i or a) and how the final vowel is spelled (e or i). All four are illustrated above. No doubt some of these occurrences are simply attempts at phonetic spelling in English, but I would imagine that at least some of these writers connect the word to the verb (or noun) catch: first you catch the chicken (or whatever), then you cook it. This would be lovely etymologically, since the English verb catch and the Italian verb cacciare ‘hunt’ have a common source in Latin capti:re ’seize’.

The word prowess is now quite opaque, the relevant sense of prow (an etymological doublet of proud) being long since obsolete. The semantic, orthographic, and phonological similarity between prowess and power makes poweress a very natural reanalysis.

(Searching for instances of this eggcorn is made slightly more difficult by the existence of something called PowerESS, in which the ESS stands for “Employee Self-Service.” On Google, limiting the search to English pages helps a great deal.)

In this eggcorn, the reanalysis is evident only in the way the word is punctuated. The original form, sing-along, is quite transparent, so I suspect that the reanalysis is not motivated by the sense of the word so much as by analogy with “V-a-N” constructions such as Rent-A-Wreck, rope-a-dope, and whack-a-mole.

I’ve labelled this one as “nearly mainstream,” because the reanalyzed form seems to be very common. As of this writing, the query “sing-a-long gets approximately a third as many hits on Google as the query “sing-along”, although it should be noted that, since Google treats hyphens and spaces as interchangeable, the hit counts will include things like “I run out of air if I have to sing a long note” and “Feel free to sing along.”

Another confounding factor here is an outfit called Sing-a-long-a, which puts on sing-along screenings of the film The Sound of Music (”the ultimate communal nun-based karaoke“). These events go under the official title Sing-a-Long-a Sound of Music, but the second “-a” is often omitted by reviewers, as in this article by Beth Nissen at CNN.com.

Linda Seebach, editorial writer at the _Rocky Mountain News_, supplied the example from Daniel Drezner’s blog.

The words _squeamish_ and _squirm_ both have comparatively unclear etymologies, but don’t appear to spring from a common origin. The former is several centuries older than the latter.

Sometimes, _squirmish_ can be found where the noun _skirmish_ would be expected. An example from and interview transcript on ABC Online, Australia:

> The story of the appointment of Robert Gerard has become a proxy leadership squirmish between supporters of Peter Costello and John Howard.