The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

This one has a certain amount of fame, since it’s one of a long list of goldwynisms, off-center quotes widely attributed to movie mogul Sam Goldwyn (who flourished in the 20s through the 40s and died in 1974 at the age of 94); no doubt he actually said a few of these, but most of them were originally uttered by others and then got attached to the much more famous Goldwyn. (This is utterly irrelevant to the eggcorn, but Goldwyn was born Samuel Goldfish, and consequently had good reason to change his name.) The most widely cited Goldwyn version seems to be: “This makes me so sore it gets my dandruff up.” Most of the recent non-Goldwyn cites have possessive “my”, and that’s the way it’s listed in Dowling’s compendium of errors.

A long time ago (in Eggcorn Database years) Ben Zimmer remarked on “dander” >> “dandruff” in connection with “dander” >> “gander”, suggesting that maybe “dandruff” should get its own entry. Here it is, finally.

The background is moderately complex. English has two words “dander”, both of them quite restricted in usage: one (only) in the idiom “get one’s dander up” ‘become angry’ and another referring to flakes in animal hair or fur (and most commonly encountered in discussions of allergens). They have nothing to do with one another historically, though the second is related to “dandruff”, referring to analogous flakes in human hair. So the progression seems to be from the utterly opaque element “dander” in the idiom to the independently occurring word referring to skin flakes in hair, and then to the fairly common word “dandruff”; it might not make a whole lot of sense, but at least there’s a real English word in there. There might even be some who get the image of people so enraged that they shake their heads with enough agitation to cause dandruff to fly from them.

Doug Wilson reported “hundreds of Web examples”, and Larry Horn added: “I’ve been using that one for years, at least since a 1994 “Words and Meaning” final exam, so it’s been around that long. I first came across it on a religious web site, of all places, in the gerundive form (”lip-singing”).” Wilson noted that “lip-sung” and “lip-sang” were also to be found (see examples 3 and 4 above) — and “lip-singed” as well (example 5 above). Examples 1 and 2 are from Ken Lakritz’s commentary in the Eggcorn Database.

Lakritz explained the motivation for the eggcorn: “Lip-syncing is the practice of pretending to sing by synchronizing your lip movements with a vocal soundtrack. This gets turned into ‘lip-singing,’ which I would understand as appearing to sing with your lips but without a voice, i.e., much the same thing.” It might be that some people are unaware of the fact that the “sync(h)” of “lip-sync(h)” is a clipping of “synchronize”/”synchronization”.

In the Eggcorn Forum, melmike writes:

“Diarrhetic” is a word: an adjective form of “diarrhea”. But even Google’s Adsense equates it with “diuretic”. We did find some other examples of this eggcorn in Google, but difficult to quantify without a lot of research (as many of the hits were re correct use of the word). However, we suspect that many folks who use “diarrhetic” for “diuretic” are not familiiar with the meaning of the existing “diarrhetic” and assume that, because a diuretic removes water from the body, sort of like diarrhea does, that the words are related.

[Edited by Ben Zimmer, 5 June 06: Marked questionable, since it’s unclear whether this is categorizable as an eggcorn. It would appear to be more of a back-formation, reanalyzing offend as offen + -ed. (Compare, for instance, the word mix, a historical back-formation from mixt.)]

Peters wrote, “I heard Reggie Miller say this one during a TNT NBA playoff game, and sure enough, it’s out there”, and supplied the four examples above.

No doubt many people fail to connect the “bog” part of “be bogged down” to wet, muddy bogs and so substitute the verb “boggle”, with its implication of inability to act, for it, losing in the process the astonishment aspect of boggling.