The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Jeanette Winterson writes:

An Italian friend of mine, who learnt her English in America, calls her mobile her “self-phone”. Presumably she has heard it called a cell phone, but never seen the words written down — and it is a phone you use yourself . . .

An unsurprising reanalysis, since “cell-phone” and “self-phone” would both be pronounced as /sÉ›lfoÊŠn/ in rapid conversation.

Jeanette Winterson writes:

The other day my elderly country neighbour asked for a bit of help to get his new washing machine into the kitchen. That generation never use “it”, always, “he” or “she”, so I wasn’t surprised to hear the washing machine called “he”, but I was surprised by what followed: “My old washing machine, he’s given up the goat,” he said, in a broad Gloucestershire accent.

“The goat?” I replied. “Are you sure?” “Oh, yes,” said my neighbour, “ain’t you never heard that expression before, given up the goat?” “Well, not exactly . . . where does it come from?” “Ah well,” said my neighbour, “in the old days, when folks didn’t have much, and mainly worked the land, a man would set store by his animals, especially his goat, and when he come to die, he would bequeath that goat to his heirs, and that is why we say, ‘he’s given up the goat’.”

I am thrilled with this and from now on there will be no more ghosts, only goats.

The substitution of oaks for oats in this expression is sometimes used as a joke (though note that two of the examples above involve jokes about “crops” that actually make less sense with oaks). It’s possible that this eggcorn appears more frequently in dialects where postvocalic stops like /t/ and /k/ are glottalized, though the /k/-/t/ alternation is not uncommon in wider usage (see, for instance, buck naked » butt naked). The last example (provided by slangologist Grant Barrett) is a double eggcorn, combining the oaks substitution with sow » soar (a non-rhotic substitution like sought after » sort after).

See also soak one’s wild oats.

The idiom “no love lost,” i.e., ‘no love that is lost,’ is reinterpreted as “no love loss,” i.e., ‘no loss of love.’ Since lost and loss are closely related, this eggcorn is rather subtle — so subtle that it has even worked its way into newspaper headlines (Edinburgh News, USA Today).

The reinterpretation may help to clarify the idiom, since “(there is) no love lost” has never been particularly transparent. As the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms explains, the expression actually had two contrary senses through the 18th century: implying either extreme affection or extreme dislike. The latter sense eventually won out.

In the Eggcorn Forum Sphinxie notes the reverse substitution from loss to lost, as in “I am sorry for your lost” (appearing frequently in online memorials and guest books).

On May 15, 2005, Christophe B. enquired via e-mail:

> Are you interested only in written or also spoken eggcorns?
>
> I am very intrigued by some wods I hear spoken by people who are intelligent but who clearly do not read, so that they use words from a average- to advanced vocabulary in a way that reflects having only heard them… an example of this is one I often hear: “Sandscript” (for Sanskrit). […]

Well, first of all thanks for the excellent eggcorn _Sanskrit»sandscript_. The examples show that it does indeed exist in written form as well, with the variants _sand script_ and _sandscrit_.

Second, Christophe’s question is an interesting one. To me, a reshaping of any aspect of a word or idiom (spelling, pronunciation, …) that is clearly linked to a new way to make sense of the original material, is much more eggcornish than a random misspelling that just happens to coincide with a pre-existing term. This would be true even in cases where the spelling _doesn’t_ change (where homographs, like _tear_/_tear_ etc., are involved): these would then have to be classified as “hidden eggcorns”.