The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Paul Brians reported the quote from the CNN transcript to the Usenet forum `alt.usage.english`. There aren’t many clear examples of this reshaped idiom in the search engine archives, but it is mentioned as an “error of Engish” in a few places, for example in a long thread of April 2005 on the TiVo Community site, available via Google Cache.

The opinions on why _bowl_ instead of _bull_ vary. A Livejournal commenter admits to the eggcorn:

> I used to think “bull in a china shop” was “bowl in a china shop.”
> which made me wonder, wouldn’t a store that sells place settings actually WANT bowls in the shop?

To which the Livejournal’s owner replies:

> Ha! Even funnier was that when I read that, I was thinking “hmm, it WOULD be dangerous to bowl in a china shop”—but you meant bowl as a NOOOOUN.

From the few examples we have, _bowl_ can conjure up

- the notion of fragility and/or the semantic overlap with _china_
- the idea that a mundane bowl would feel out of place surrounded by delicate china
- the perilous activity of bowling in a china shop, a concept not unlike that of the original idiom

For a significant number of people, the insect’s name evokes predatory behavior rather than a religious posture. Raw Google counts: 60,200 for the eggcorn (certainly including a number of occurrences of intentional wordplay) vs. 840,000 for the original.

The “hammer” part of “hammer and tongs” (most often in “go hammer and tongs” or “go at it hammer and tongs”) is clear enough, but for people these days, most of us removed from any experience of blacksmithing, the “tongs” part is baffling. So some of us have rationalized the expression as involving “thongs” ‘whips’, that is, as referring to two sorts of weapons or instruments of punishment that might be used in agonistic confrontations. This one seems extremely unlikely to have arisen as a typo, and not very likely to have arisen through mishearing.

A hundred or so relevant google webhits (on 30 December 2005), mostly in the domains where agonistic confrontations are routine: sports and politics. There are some other hits deliberately playing with “thongs” as the name of an article of apparel.

I first heard this from an interviewee on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition on 30 December 2005.

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’.

The word prowess is now quite opaque, the relevant sense of prow (an etymological doublet of proud) being long since obsolete. The semantic, orthographic, and phonological similarity between prowess and power makes poweress a very natural reanalysis.

(Searching for instances of this eggcorn is made slightly more difficult by the existence of something called PowerESS, in which the ESS stands for “Employee Self-Service.” On Google, limiting the search to English pages helps a great deal.)