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roll » role

Chiefly in:   role call

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Unsure of the condition of my men, I ordered a role call. (link)
  • The Role Call of Faith from Hebrews 11 listed the individuals who took action that demonstrated their faith. (link)
  • Take attendance: role call, clipboard, sign in, seating chart. (link)

It is possible to equate ‘role’ with ‘duty’, and since ‘roll call’ is mostly used in a military context, there could be some semantic association being made with soldiers’ “roles” in battle. It’s particularly transparent in the second quote above — the individual choosing to take on a role that displays faithfulness. But I’m not sure how much of an eggcorn it is in the classroom context — any ideas?

| 1 comment | link | entered by Sravana Reddy, 2005/07/02 |

courtesy » curtsey

Chiefly in:   curtsey of , curtsey call

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Another version of the above counter or vessel style sink. (photo curtsey of customer).” (link)
  • “Colour Mixing with Effetre (Moretti) curtsey of Kay Powell.” (link)
  • “Our Daily Screenshot comes to us curtsey of Baja’s Knights of Steel. In today’s image we see…” (link)
  • “…could stoop no lower in his career of selling out the land of his birth and the cause of his Protestant forefathers, he pays a curtsey call on the Pope…” (link)

The politeness of the curtsey as a gesture probably accounts for “courtesy” >> “curtsey”. “Curtsey of” in attributions of sources, as in the first three cites, is reasonably frequent — about 4,000 Google webhits on 1 July 2005 (as against about 26,000,000 for “courtesy of”) — while “curtsey call” is much less frequent (ca. 100 webhits) and is mostly confined to sources in Africa and South Asia, though the cite above is from a source in Northern Ireland.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/07/01 |

wholesale » whole-scale

Variant(s):  wholescale, whole scale

Classification: English – nearly mainstream

Spotted in the wild:

  • In exchange for steep tariff reductions and whole-scale reforms of the Chinese trading system, the United States gives up nothing. (House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing, May 3, 2000)
  • The NACB has called on the government to scrap prescription charges or institute a whole scale reform of the charging system to make sure the poor are not penalised by pricing the pre-payment certificates on a sliding scale. (BBC, July 3, 2001)
  • Shifting the FBI’s focus from criminal prosecution to prevention of future terrorist attacks makes sense, but Congress has a constitutional responsibility to carefully review any whole-scale changes of our federal law enforcement capabilities. (Congressman Frank R. Wolf press release, June 5, 2002)
  • Although minor changes in protein conformation have been observed in crystals, for example, a localized pocket in carbonmonoxy myoglobin (Zhu et al. 1992), to the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of whole-scale changes in secondary structure. (Protein Science, May 2004)

Analyzed or reported by:

This is common enough to receive an entry in the _Oxford English Dictionary_, with citations back to 1960:

wholescale, a.

[f. WHOLE a. + SCALE n.3, influenced by WHOLESALE n., a., adv.]

= WHOLESALE a. 5. Cf. full-scale.


1960 B. BERGONZI in F. Kermode Living Milton x. 168 Leavis’s case..is not a mere critical reappraisal of Milton, but a whole-scale demolition. [etc.]

It’s not surprising that as _wholesale_ moves away from its original mercantile usage to a more figurative sense of extensiveness, the _-sale_ element would be reinterpreted as _-scale_ to match _full-scale_, _large-scale_, _broad-scale_, etc.

| Comments Off link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/07/01 |

limb » lurch

Chiefly in:   out on a lurch

Classification: English – not an eggcorn

Spotted in the wild:

  • “There are no legal weapons. There’s nothing left in the arsenal. We’re out on a lurch.” (Ralph Klein, premier of the Canadian province of Alberta. As reported by CBC News, June 30, 2005)

A google on “out on a lurch” results in 35 hits at the time of making this entry. A combination, seemingly, of “left in the lurch” and “out on a limb.”

[Edited by Ben Zimmer and marked “questionable”: because of the lack of phonetic similarity between _limb_ and _lurch_, this is probably better classified as an idiom blend.]

[Edited by Chris Waigl and boldly marked as “not an eggcorn” — idiom blends are interesting and amusing, but a different stroke of fish.]

| 1 comment | link | entered by Pearl, 2005/06/30 |

fartlek » fartlick

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • That stated there are types of training that you can do at this point that will help you in the long run, the main being LT training and Fartlick training. (runnersworld.com forum)
  • I believe in Fartlick type training, I believe swimming doesn’t use enough it enough. (link)
  • I ran track in HS, and we used to do these things that sounded like “fartlick” - high speed dashes followed by a jog for a little, then back to the dash and then the jog - over and over and over. We used to giggle at the name though - now it makes sense! (link)
  • Three days later at the holloween run. I did an easy mile warm up then some fartlick type pick ups. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

AHD4 has the following entry for _fartlek_:

> 1. An athletic training technique, used especially in running, in which periods of intense effort alternate with periods of less strenuous effort in a continuous workout.
> 2. A workout using this technique.
>
> _[Swedish, speed play : fart, running, speed (from fara, to go, move, from Old Norse) + lek, play (from leka, to play, from Old Norse leika).]_

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/06/29 |
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