The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Philip Jensen sent me the New Yorker quotation (from Nancy Franklin) by e-mail on 22 June 2007; a discussion then ensued on the American Dialect Society mailing list. A few days earlier, on 19 June, the Grammarphobia site coped with a complaint from a reader about this very expression: “One of my pet peeves is hearing people say “pawn off” when they mean “palm off.” Why do they say that?”

The most recent OED (December 2005 draft revision) has no usage note on the relevant subentry for “pawn”. It gives early cites (1763, 1787) for “pawn upon” — the first cite for “palm off (on/upon)” is from 1832 — and then cites (mostly from elevated sources) through 2003. MWDEU says the expression “would appear to have originated by similarity of sound to palm in palm off… but it may in fact be a dialectal variant.”

It turns out that OED1 and OED2 had an “Erron.” label on this usage, but that label has now been removed, presumably in recognition of the fact that, as we say here on the ecdb, the usage is “nearly mainstream”. Nevertheless, Paul Brians treats it as a straightforward error. (And Bryan Garner doesn’t mention it at all.)

Obviously, “pawn off” still rubs some people the wrong way, but there are others (like me) who don’t even notice it as worthy of comment.

[Thanks to Ben Zimmer and Jesse Sheidlower for supplying most of the information above.]

The first cite is in a New York Times Magazine article. Googling on “strum up support” gets you a fair number of cites having to do with music-making, but also some, like the ones above, that don’t.

I wouldn’t have thought that the idiom “drum up” was so opaque that re-shaping was called for or that the sense of “strum up” (vs. down) used with reference to playing musical instruments would be salient to obtaining a goal by persistent effort, but the examples are out there.

[Addendum: Doug Harris on ADS-L, 13 June 2007, attempting to rationalize the eggcorn (which he hadn’t heard before), writes that it “makes perfect sense if referring to the effort stringed-instrument-bearing buskers, flower children and the like do to allow them to continue the lifestyle they’ve chosen.”]

The Cupertino Effect has also produced several uses of “expedient growth”.

apprentice writes in her blog:

> Tuesday night I was at Poetry School, and a poem I’d written about a plantation of trees was really well received, which pleased me a lot […]
>
> But I was asked about a phrase I’d put in it, which was stalk-still, which I meant as a deliberate play on stock-still. People were interested in knowing if I had actually meant to do it. And I had, because I’d caught a programme on the BBC that relates to this site _[the Eggcorn Database]_ on eggcorns.

Most writers in the examples seem to have “still as a stalk” in mind, but the cite from the Tails of birding blog has a reference to stalking just a few lines before it employs the eggcorn: _Again we stalked carefully along the trail, using each opening in the marsh willows to search through the broken reeds._

_High dungeon_ is one of the dozens of yet-to-be-edited contributions to the eggcorn hunt made by Ken Lakritz on this site. Ken, even if we are slow and it doesn’t always look like it, we will eventually get there.

Paul Kaser’s use of the eggcorn in his letter to _College English_ neatly illustrates the Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: the question at the center of the controversy is precisely that of pointing out and correcting other people’s usage of English.

The eggcorn is not rare (ca 1800 GHits vs. 85,000 for the original phrase), presumably because _dudgeon_ is completely opaque, and the origin of the word unknown, according to AHD4.