mast » mass

Chiefly in:   flying a flag at half-mass

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • Flying Your Flag Half Mass
    When you are on the court and tragedy strikes or some unexpected disturbing event leaves you injured to the very core, you must step back and allow yourself to feel the pain. It is time to fly your flag at half mass. (DesignerLife Learning Cafe)
  • The flag is flown at half mass, or in the middle of the flagpole, on Memorial Day. People do that to honor those Americans who died fighting for their country. (link)
  • Has anyone been to Disney since the attack on the USA? I keep receiving e-mails that Disney refuses to fly flags at half mass. (The Magical Mouse forum, September 19, 2001)
  • […]
    The book you have written and passed to your troops
    Is missing some lines and some very big loops
    A country in morning for loved ones that past
    A country that stands by its flag at half mass
    […] (Sgt. Moms)
  • the flag flew at half-mass today
    to cover the scars, to cover the pain
    all the heads are hung in shame
    the flag flew at half-mass today
    […] (Almost Smart, Writer's Forum, Jan 24, 2004)

Analyzed or reported by:

| 4 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/10/27 |

incestuous » insectuous

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • But HCE is compromised by guilt, his nebulous sin in the park and his “insectuous longing” burden him with the stain of “original sin.” (The Modern World, analysis of "Finnegans Wake")
  • Zues was a womanizer and had an insectuous relationship with his sister […] (Ultimate Central Forum, Oct 14, 2004)
  • Sounded almost as if it was vaugely insectuous. I wondered if Luke was his brother or something, he being the guy in the photo. (link)
  • The Text of Deuteromony 23:2 uses the Hebrew “mamzer” which does not mean “bastard.” To be a mamzer, the child must be born from an insectuous relationship specifically forbidden in Leviticus 20. (alt.christnet.christianlife, Oct 19, 2005)

Analyzed or reported by:

Not a very frequent eggcorn. Most of the occurrences of _insectuous relationship_ and the like are puns.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/10/27 |

ham-fisted » hand fisted

Variant(s):  handfisted, hand-fisted

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion

Spotted in the wild:

  • The public sector unions aren’t going to let a team of handfisted amateurs take their overtime away. (Jane Galt at Asymmetrical Information, blog entry, August 11, 2004)
  • This goes back pre-9/11 to the transformation that Rumsfeld and people associated with him tried to do to the military, which hurt the army, helped some other parts. And he did it in a hand fisted way, which is his style, and he made a lot of people angry. (PBS, transcript of an interview with David Brooks, April 4, 2003)
  • However, this is a bit of a handfisted way of making copies and is what we in the trade call “lossy”. (uk.media.dvd, Dec 7, 2001)
  • However, the Bush Administration did not make quite that same argument. They could have but they didn’t. Was that just hand-fistedness? […] As indeed The New York Times has in a rather hand-fisted way confirmed for us now. (Hoover Institution, interview transcript, presenter Peter Robinson speaking, March 25, 2005)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Linda Seebach via Mark Liberman at Language Log (Hand fisted, August 14, 2004)

Pat Schwieterman reminded us in the forum that this relatively old and well-documented find was still absent from the collection.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/10/26 |

soup » supe

Chiefly in:   suped-up

Classification: English – nearly mainstream

Spotted in the wild:

  • Noxious fumes spurted from the oversized exhaust pipes as suped-up engines revved to deafening effect. (Chapel Hill News, Oct 22, 2005)
  • And the current generation are technology hot-roders who want to supe up cars like the Prius — not with tail fins, but technology and hardware like advanced battery packs. (smartmoney.com, October 20, 2005)
  • Participants ranging from suped-up SUVs to military behemoths will be graded on how well they can self-drive on rough road, make sharp turns and avoid obstacles — hay bales, trash cans, wrecked cars — while relying on GPS navigation and sensors, radar, lasers and cameras that feed information to computers. (Globe and Mail, September 28, 2005)
  • Forget cars. The new hot think is suping up your chainsaw. (collegehumor.com)

Analyzed or reported by:

On October 25, 2005, our contributor Kaz Vorpal entered the putative substitution _supe up»soup up_ in the database, with the following note:

> When you supe up a car, you are making the car super, or supercharging it. Not adding a liquified meal.
>
> The supercharger was patented in 1900.

This only goes to show how easy it is to create an eggcorn. The original form is indeed _soup up_. Arnold Zwicky supplied the following references:

> AHD4 and NOAD2 both have *only* “soup up”, AHD without further comment, NOAD suggesting that “super-” might have influenced the formation. OED2 has no entry for “supe” v., but does have “soup up” v. from 1931 (in “souped up”), which it suggests might have been influenced by “super-”, but otherwise derives from the following sense of “soup” n.:
>
> 1911 Webster’s Dict., Soup, any material injected into a horse with a view to changing its speed or temperament.

NSOED and Merriam-Webster Online also cite _soup up_ only.

| 4 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/10/26 |

founder » flounder

Classification: English – questionable

Spotted in the wild:

  • As the wind became stronger, the tiny boat floundered in the waves. (link)
  • With almost all of its sails fully flown, the ship floundered in the swells off of the Outer Banks for a while before breaking apart. (link)

When a ship is awash with water and unable to manoeuvre normally, it is said to founder. Perhaps because flounders are fish in the same seas as the ships, it’s almost more common to refer to a ship, today, as floundering than foundering.

In fact, in one of the references added here, flounder is actually given as a vocabulary word, erroneously defined as a boat awash in the sea.

Addendum/edit by CW, 2005/10/25: The substitution _founder/flounder_ (in both direction) has been submitted to the Eggcorn database several times and is discussed by Paul Brians and the American Heritage Book of English Usage. It is, however, not an eggcorn. The two verbs are phonologically and semantically similar, but it is unclear that one is being reanalyzed in terms of the other. An eggcorn requires that someone has understood the sense and spelling of word they actually employ, but not the word that is conventionally used in that particular case. See also Arnold Zwicky’s discussion of _flout»flaunt_ (also not an eggcorn).

Addendum/edit by AZ, 2005/10/26: Harsh, Chris, harsh. In fact, some people have explained to me that “flounder” is the word to use, because a ship in this sort of distress flops about like a fish — a flounder, in particular — out of water. The association with flounder (the fish) seems to be unetymological: OED2 labels it “of obscure etymology”, suggests various non-fishy sources, and gives as its earliest sense the not particularly fish-related ’stumble’ (attested from 1592). But then the sense extended to ’struggle violently and clumsily, struggle in mire’ and the way was open for comparison to a flopping flounder. (Suspiciously, several of the OED2’s citations actually mention fish.) In any case, “flounder, founder” is a great favorite of usage advisers: there’s a MWDEU entry with references to earlier writers, and most of the recent usage dictionaries have an entry — Bryson, Burchfield, Fiske, Garner, O’Conner, and Steinmann & Keller, in addition to Brians and the American Heritage folks. Of these authorities, only Steinmann & Keller (Good Grammar Made Easy, 1999, p. 140) seem to make the fish connection, but they still tell you not to use “flounder” for sinking vessels: “flounder, founder Sometimes confused. To flounder is what a fish (the flounder, for example) does out of water (move clumsily); figuratively, to be active without accomplishing anything. To founder is to sink because full of water: figuratively, to fail.”

| Comments Off link | entered by Kaz, 2005/10/25 |