The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

The original expression is “just grew like Topsy,” referring to Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who “jes grew.” As the original referent of “Topsy” becomes less and less familiar, the term has been reanalyzed by some as “top seed,” which sounds like something that might grow quickly.

Liberman gives 14 examples from the net, and comments:

An “oops” page notes this as one of those cases where someone has “taken a common phrase or word and mutilated it”. The discussion highlights the poetic force of such mistakes:

The funny thing about this was that it was a former neighbor of mine whose name was Dawn. Putting aside the fact that she wasn’t the brightest beam shining through the window, I think she hit on something here. I mean, when something dawns on us, isn’t it often like a “DONG!” on the head?!?

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Nice justification for the eggcorn.

Wallraff reports:

Suzanne Staszak-Silva, of Scotch Plains, N.J., writes: “My husband and I have a dispute regarding the use of the term landline. When people receive or make calls on a cellular phone but decide they would like to take the call on a phone connected to the wall via a phone jack, they usually refer to this phone as a landline. My husband says this is incorrect and the right term is LAN (local-area network) line. I say he’s wrong. I think people use landline to denote a phone that is connected to the large brown poles that line our streets, and that LAN line refers to computer connections. Who is correct?”

You are. Anyone who doesn’t want to call a phone line a phone line ought to call it a WAN (wide-area network) line. And thanks for the new eggcorn.

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This one is not easy to search for, because “LAN line” is a high-frequency expression, abbreviating “local area network line”, a line (telephone line or cable) serving a local area network; such connections involve lines only indirectly, usually wirelessly, rather than having computers directly plugged into a phone line.

As for Wallraff’s advice, anyone who wants to refer to a phone directly connected to a phone line should call it a landline phone. WAN lines are something else.

In any case, Staszak-Silva’s husband has improved on “landline”, with its unclear connection to land, by eggcorning it to “LAN line”, using a term he’s familiar with.

The word-part “-tule” has been reinterpreted as the word “jewel”. Only five or so Google web cites, but they look firm. [From Arnold Zwicky, who posted a duplicate of this entry just seconds after Ben posted his. As Ben said on ADS-L: Just think, if this had been noted on Language Log a few years ago, we might all be referring to “pus jewels” instead of “eggcorns”…]

This one has a certain amount of fame, since it’s one of a long list of goldwynisms, off-center quotes widely attributed to movie mogul Sam Goldwyn (who flourished in the 20s through the 40s and died in 1974 at the age of 94); no doubt he actually said a few of these, but most of them were originally uttered by others and then got attached to the much more famous Goldwyn. (This is utterly irrelevant to the eggcorn, but Goldwyn was born Samuel Goldfish, and consequently had good reason to change his name.) The most widely cited Goldwyn version seems to be: “This makes me so sore it gets my dandruff up.” Most of the recent non-Goldwyn cites have possessive “my”, and that’s the way it’s listed in Dowling’s compendium of errors.

A long time ago (in Eggcorn Database years) Ben Zimmer remarked on “dander” >> “dandruff” in connection with “dander” >> “gander”, suggesting that maybe “dandruff” should get its own entry. Here it is, finally.

The background is moderately complex. English has two words “dander”, both of them quite restricted in usage: one (only) in the idiom “get one’s dander up” ‘become angry’ and another referring to flakes in animal hair or fur (and most commonly encountered in discussions of allergens). They have nothing to do with one another historically, though the second is related to “dandruff”, referring to analogous flakes in human hair. So the progression seems to be from the utterly opaque element “dander” in the idiom to the independently occurring word referring to skin flakes in hair, and then to the fairly common word “dandruff”; it might not make a whole lot of sense, but at least there’s a real English word in there. There might even be some who get the image of people so enraged that they shake their heads with enough agitation to cause dandruff to fly from them.