The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Cleary’s original report: BBC America’s print and online catalogues contain the following blurb for the Guinness Toucan T-shirt: “Dublin’s most famous brewery has been slacking thirsts for more than 175 years….”

I replied on ADS-L at the time: The problem is that the OED has the verb “slack” ‘to slake (one’s thirst)’ from 1631 on, and that transitive “slack” ‘reduce, diminish’
would make sense with the object “thirst”. And in fact “slack” and “slake” are developments from the same OE verb. So this isn’t a very clear case. I suspect that the idiom “slake one’s thirst” has been eggcorned more than once to “slack” (using a much more common word), but it’s hard to verify this.

Back in 2005, “scarequotes” noted: “Wreckless driving” pulls up 24,500 Google hits, though some of these are obviously wordplay (“wreckless driving” referring to futuristic cars that won’t crash). “Wreckless driver” pulls up 1760.

You can also find a fair number of cites for “wreckless abandon”, but an awful lot of them look like wordplay.

As Laura Staum Casasanto noted when she sent me the third example above, there’s a problem with the meaning: understood literally, “wreckless” is almost the opposite of “reckless”. So this might just be a “demi-eggcorn” reshaping, in which the unfamiliar element reck (historically related to reckon) is re-spelled as a familiar element, wreck, without significantly improving the meaning. There is that connection between driving and wrecks, though.

From my Language Log discussion: This one … was noted in a discussion on the Eggcorn Forum back in March. You can google up a pile of hits; it’s all over the place. The question then is whether this is a simple misspelling, with initial /k/ spelled by the more common C rather than K; or a spelling like pail for pale in beyond the pail …; or an eggcorn in which cows are somehow involved (a possibility that the posters on the forum found unlikely). It is, of course, possible that different people have hit on the spelling by different routes.

(The second possibility is that the expression has been reshaped so as to contain a familiar element (two familiar elements, in the case of cow-tao), but without any improvement in the semantics — what I called a “demi-eggcorn” in this Language Log posting.)

Back in November 2005 on the Eggcorn Forum, Ken Lakritz noted cow toe as a variant spelling of kowtow. He suggested that showing deference by kissing someone’s toe might be involved in this version — but it could be based on a mispronunciation of written {kowtow} (or {cow-tow}), based on the fact that {tow} can be pronounced like toe.

From my discussion on Language Log: This variant (which seems to be widely distributed in the U.S. and, from testimony on ADS-L, goes back to the 19th century) is clearly based on the disyllabic pronunciation of sophomore, with both the vowel and the offset consonant of the first syllable reshaped so as yield a familiar English word, south, in place of the unfamiliar first syllable of the original. Maybe some people think the compass point has something to do with the second year of college, but I suspect that the motive for the reshaping is primarily the search for familiar elements, for some people quite possibly encouraged by the south of the equally opaque southpaw. (Larry Horn, who made this suggestion on ADS-L, noted that historically southpaw is compositional, but with an etymology that hardly anyone appreciates; for most people, it’s just a idiomatic compound. For the etymology, see southpaw in AHD4.)

In this posting, I suggest that there are two drives behind reshapings: to find familiar elements as much as possible, and to find meaning as much as possible. Classic eggcorns show both effects, “demi-eggcorns” like southmore (and beyond the pail and cow-tow and many others) only the first.