mishmash » mixmash

Variant(s):  mix-mash, mix(-)mosh

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • At first, students and teachers may miss the units and projects, long source themes, outlines, How-to books, word games, and all the empurpled mix-mash we have fallen heir to. (Floyd Rinker, "Priorities in the English Curriculum," English Journal Vol. 51, No. 5 (May 1962), p. 312)
  • ‘Photography in the Fine Arts’ was a distressing mixmash. (Ansel Adams, Oct. 14, 1962 letter, Ansel Adams: Letters, 1916-1984 (2001), p. 295)
  • I’ll let you deal with figuring the convention out as I use a number of custom widgets subclassed from ’stock’ Gtk and so you’ll see a mixmash of classic Gtk and your skin. (Postfish README file, Xiph.Org, 2005)
  • You will see a mixmash of different styles and layouts, some good, some bad, but thumbing through so many varied examples should give you plenty of ideas for possible designs and layouts for your own poster. (Kalev H. Leetaru, "A Speaker's Guide to Painless and Successful Public Speaking," Mar. 24, 2008, p. 24)
  • Oh sorry, it is all in English. I don’t divide the two languages sometimes. In our house it is a mixmash of English and German! (Netty, Language Log comment, Jan. 26, 2009)
  • “It was a mixmosh of people — it wasn’t just black and white — and everybody’s got their cultures. Everybody’s got their music and their religion, and you just throw that into the pot and stir it up,” Salgado continues. “That’s why the blues is what it is: because America was a hybrid melting pot of all these cultures.” (Bay Weekly, May 16-22, 2002)
  • A mixmosh of various types of audio created using recording programs. (Crunkcore Records)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Arnold Zwicky (ADS-L, Jan. 26, 2009)

Mixmash takes the reduplicative first syllable of mishmash and transforms it into the semantically transparent mix. In fact, the linkage between mix and mash goes back etymologically all the way to the Indo-European root *meik-. The reduplication of mash into mishmash has also been paralleled by forms with mix, such as the variants mixty-maxty, mixter-maxter, and mixie-maxie from Scotland/N. England.

More recently, mixing and mashing have become allied concepts in the world of musical production (mix-master, mash-up, etc.). So it’s not surprising that mixmash often appears as an intentional lexical mash-up in contexts relating to music and technology, e.g. Mix Mash Records or MixMash VJ services. Such intentional uses may lead to an acceptance of mixmash as a variant of mishmash in relevant fields — as in the 2005 example above, from the README file for Postfish (”a digital audio post-processing, restoration, filtering and mixdown tool”).

Meanwhile, the variant mix(-)mosh suggests two additional contributing factors: the Yiddish-influenced pronunciation of mishmash as [mɪʃmɑʃ] (often spelled mishmosh) rather than [mɪʃmæʃ], and the newer sense of mosh to describe slam-dancing (mosh pit, etc.).

| comment | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2009/01/26 |

bludgeon » bloodgeon

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • On Sunday morning (2:30am), a mexican woman and her 19 year old daughter got bloodgeoned to death here in Fremont. (Livejournal post, 2 Feb, 2004)
  • Democracy is the bloodgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people. (reader comment, accessed Jan 4, 2009)
  • There are waaay too many games out there with ‘rap’ gangster types on it or games that encourage people to bloodgeon their friends to death with bats or whatever. (Forza2 motorsport forum, July 5, 2007)
  • My first day saw the brutal task of bloodgeoning a mouse to death to feed a jaguarundi, and my eyes were the first to behold the 5 hour old baby Spider Monkey. (Blog post, June 07, 2007)

Analyzed or reported by:

A bloodthirsty eggcorn. The origin of _bludgeon_ is not well understood. AHD4 laconically states “[Origin unknown.]”, and the OED offers several lines of inquiry — or speculation:

> [Not found before the 18th c.: origin unknown.
_Blogon_ (with g = j) is quoted by Dr. Whitley Stokes from the Cornish drama _Origo Mundi_ (? 14th c.), but its relation to the English is uncertain. Other Celtic etymologies sometimes proposed are on many grounds untenable. A Du. vb. _bludsen_ to bruise, has also been compared; and it has been suggested that the word is of cant origin, connected with _blood_.]

It is therefore possible — though not very likely — that users of the eggcorn are even going back to the word origin.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2009/01/04 |

entree » ontray

Classification: English – cross-language

Spotted in the wild:

  • We only eat here twice a year its the best!! even though its sometimes a long wait its worh it! the apitizors,ontrays and deserts are amazing. (Restaurant review, July 18, 2007)
  • Does anyone know japanese Ontrays, Dinners/main courses, and/or Dessert recipes? (Yahoo! Answers, accessed 2009-01-03)
  • My boss asked me to bring two on-trays to our christmas party, but I honestly don’t know what to put on the trays. (Yahoo! Answers, accessed 2009-01-03)
  • Maybe after you have finished you could have lunch and include some ontrays (i-do.com wedding planning boards, Mar 9, 2006)

Analyzed or reported by:

This eggcorn is not very common: most people likely would try to look up an unfamiliar word if they recognize it as a borrowing from a foreign language. When it occurs, though, it is a classical cross-language eggcorn. As David Tuggy writes in his forum post:

> The imagery seems clear enough: entrees are often brought to diners on trays, so one might well think this was the reason for the name.

Note that on-tray/entree puns abound in the restaurant business, as a web search quickly shows, and that OnTray is also a brand name for a little tray-like container that attaches to shopping cart handles, used for holding snacks for children sitting in the shopping cart seat.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2009/01/04 |