The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Compare ad » and, which results in and hominem, and infinitum, and and nauseam. The Latin preposition ad, meaning “to,” is a cognate of English at, both derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *ad-.

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.

Wikipedia explains:

> Whereas the names of many roads in Jerusalem are translated into English, Hebrew, and Arabic for their signs, the name Via Dolorosa is used in all three languages.

The link between the crucifixion of Jesus and roses is not quite clear to me, but appears to exist in the minds of some writers who are unclear about the sense of “dolorosa”, creating an Italian or Spanish sounding eggcorn from the Latin.

It is only very rarely that we enter non-eggcorns into the database, but I am making an exception for _ad homonym_.

First of all, homonyms — or rather, homophones, i.e. words that sound alike but aren’t necessarily spelled alike — enter into the genesis of eggcorns themselves.

Second, because the _ad homonym_ malapropism illustrates very nicely what elements are required to make an eggcorn: it is a non-standard reshaping of an established term (check!), _homonym_ and _hominem_ are pronounced nearly the same (check!), but it _isn’t_ a re-interpretation that is based on (a correct understanding of the semantics of) the target word _homonym_.

In a typical eggcorn, the writer understands the sense of the word he or she actually employs; the problem is that the use takes up the place already occupied by a different word, often part of a set phrase. Here, however, the eggcorn users don’t give any sign that they know what a homonym is. In one of the examples, the writer obviously believes that _ad homonym_ means _against the man_ in Latin. It’s the Latin that is faulty, along with the recollection of what the expression is supposed to be, precisely. (And spell-checkers might have had their bit to add, too. Case in point: the spell-checker I just used on this entry didn’t know _hominem_ and suggested _hominid_. _Ad hominid_ also yields over a hundred Google hits, compared to several thousand for _ad homonym(s)_.)

The replacement of a “complicated phrase” by another “complicated phrase” is rarely an eggcorn: often, the writer is unclear about the meaning of both, not only about the original.

One of the simple pleasures of Italian home-style cooking is the style of fricasseeing meat — most often chicken, though other meats can be treated in the same way — called, in Italian, alla cacciatora ‘hunter’s style’ or cacciatore or cacciatora (in French, chasseur). In food writing in English, cacciatore seems to be the most common variant, and there’s an alternative spelling cacciatori, in which the common pronunciation of word-final unaccented -e as /i/ in English is carried over into the spelling.

But four other spellings are not infrequent in English, and all involve the reshaping of the first syllable as catch; the spellings vary in how the medial unaccented vowel is spelled (i or a) and how the final vowel is spelled (e or i). All four are illustrated above. No doubt some of these occurrences are simply attempts at phonetic spelling in English, but I would imagine that at least some of these writers connect the word to the verb (or noun) catch: first you catch the chicken (or whatever), then you cook it. This would be lovely etymologically, since the English verb catch and the Italian verb cacciare ‘hunt’ have a common source in Latin capti:re ’seize’.