The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

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.

Mark Mandel: I first saw “preannuals” for “perennials” on a flyer, handwritten and photocopied, that I picked up at our local Farmers’ Market last fall: “This being our last Market Saturday for the season, a tinge of sadness but also of hope prevails as we reorganize, till the soil, plant seeds, cover preannuals to overwinter, and in the wintertime start plants in our greenhouse.”

Reshaping the somewhat opaque -ennial part of perennial makes a clear contrast to annual, as in the cites above. Reshaping the per- part to pre- supplies a more easily recognizable prefix, though the semantics isn’t clear to me.

Terms that contain proper names are often an open invitation for eggcornification. If you’ve never heard of Hans Geiger (1882-1945)[1], you may easily be led to think that the name of the instrument for measuring radioactivity comes from the very large numbers you tend to end up with when using it.

As an aside, in German, the stressed (first) syllable of Geiger’s name is pronounced with the diphthong [aɪ] (the sound in _bite_ or _lie_).

[1] I have an unfair advantage here as I went to the same secondary school as he did and, before each physics lesson, waited right in front of a display illustrating his achievements.

It is hard to credit anyone for this eggcorn. The _all tolled_ version has been suggested twice on this very site, by Bill Bevis and Ken Lakritz, and is, as noted above, also in Brians. Jan Freeman used it as an example in her Eggcorn-themed column _Wanton Eggcorns_ in the Boston Globe on April 8, 2007.

Quite a number of people are convinced the _tolled_ version is the correct one and defend it, because it makes more sense to them:

* _It’s “all tolled” as in tallied, not “all told”
/english nazi_ (link)
* _untold instead of untolled when referring to numbers. “untold numbers of civilians were killed.” i hate that._ (link)