The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Once in a while I select an eggcorn because it appears in the seach terms of visitors to this site (the Eggcorn Database & associated forums). When I saw “youthamism” ranked 15th both for the month of August 2009 and for the enitre year to date, it seemed to me that something of interest was happening here.

Peter Forster’s forum post, which attracted all these visits, lists two innovations: _youthamism_ as noted here, and the less eggcornish _euthamism_ (usually in effect a creative error for _euthanaisa_, maybe triggered by the less common -sia suffix). The variant _youthanism_ can be found, too, indeed at a higher frequency than _youthamism_. Both, as eggcornish substitutions for _euphemism_, rely on an association of coy camouflage of offending words with youth.

However, _youthanism_ and to a lesser degree _youthamism_ can occur in situations of questionable eggcorn status, in the sense of “youth slang” — a blendoid reshaping of euphemism, most likely:

* _You have to limit yourself on how many “get her done” and “gag me with a spoon” you can have in your life. Youthamism are just that, for the youth to use, no honest adult should fall for the MTV trappings._ (link)
* _Can we start calling young slang “youthanisms”?_ (link)
* _Reading numerous reviews of this hotel posted here is mystifying, many contrasting comments like “smells of urine” or “sparsely furnished,“ to such superlatives as “immaculate” and youthanisms like “Plush,” demonstrating that this hotels appeal is not bound by any generational gaps._ (link)

Last, for reasons that are not clear, we find cites where _youtha(n|m)ism_ is employed in the sense of “quote” or “maxim”:

* _I am doing a speech why Sir Paul McCartney should be on the 4th plynth in London..whatare some famous quotes? like quotes to help persuade people to have him up there. My teacher is fairly old - around 50-60 and likes old, famous quotes E.g. She likes the quote “lend me your ears” by William Shakespeare. Any youthanisms would be good._ (link)
* _need some help here… I need to know some youthanisms. I typed it into the search engine Google but it came up with nothing… By youthanisms i mean something like “I want to live life to it’s fullest” “I want to live out my time” “I want to live my 9 lives” That kind of stuff…_ (link)

An _imprimatur_ — the Latin can be translated as _let it be printed_ — was originally an official license to print or publish, granted by the Roman Catholic church, thereby declaring the work in question as compatible with Roman Catholic doctrine. The word is used by extension to refer to any official endorsement, or even more widely, any kind of (emphatic) approval. The semantic link with _premature_ is that for a work that requires some institution’s imprimature, it would be premature to publish it until the imprimatur has been granted.

_Impremature_ can also be found substituting for the word _imprint_ — a particular publisher’s brand or label — as for example in:

> “Chances are good that someone–perhaps _Salon_, _Huffington Post_, the _Daily Beast_–will pick up Froomkin’s column and keep it going. Of course, it won’t quite be the same. It won’t have the Washington Post’s impremature on it.” (link)

What may be happening here is that the two rather learned terms _imprimatur_ and _imprint_ (both obviously close etymological relatives) blend in some speakers’ vocabulary, and the _imprimatur_>_impremature_ substitution extends out to _imprint_.

_Cacophony_, from Greek κακός (kakos, “bad”) + φωνή (phonē, “voice”), has been around in English since the mid-1600s at least, according to Merriam-Webster. Analogous words with close to the same sense exist in French (cacophonie), Spanish (cacofonía), German (Kakofonie), Norwegian (kakofoni) and many other languages.

Coughing, as Peter Forster notes in his Eggcorn forum post, “makes a harsh and discordant noise, and it seems reasonable to suppose that those using a ‘cacoughany’ spelling may have made some association between the two and have entered, therefore, eggcorn territory.” When _cacoughany_ refers to a specific sound the word can be understood as describing it as as harsh and unpleasant as coughing.

There are quite a few other spelling variants, such as _cacoughony_ (which looks eggcornish) or _cacoffini_ (which looks more like spelling-by-ear, without any plausible link to _coffin_).

Michael Covarrubias noted this eggcorn in his August 2, 2009 posting on the American Dialect Society’s listserv, overhearing ep. 2 of season 1 of the show _Coach_ (_I dropped on my knees, curled up in the feeble position, closed my eyes and screamed my head off_). He also noted that googling “the feeble position” returns a number of hits from skateboarding sites and discussion, where the phrase seems to refer to a position of the board perched on the edge of a ramp.

If a person is said to be placed (often: “curled up”) in the fetal position, this generally carries a sense beyond the mere positioning of the rump and limbs, but also signifies a state of extreme weakness and vulnerability. _Feeble_ is an adjective close to this sense. The substitution of [b] for the flapped t in _fetal_ — its usual realization in American English — is an easy change to make.