strait » straight

Chiefly in:   straightjacket, straight-laced, Straight(s) of X

Classification: English – nearly mainstream

Spotted in the wild:

  • “…loosening a few strings of the economic straightjacket” (John Fischer, Harper's, July 1972)
  • “… showed up a straight-laced … church” (Dennis Farney, Wall Street Journal, 12 Nov. 1981)
  • “On the west, however, rise the Rocky Mountains, that immense range which, commencing at the Straights of Magellan, follows the western coast of Southern …” (link)
  • “… Northumberland Strait (X6-5) and the Straight of Belle Isle (X3-4, which was undoubtedly poorly sampled); Chaleur Bay (X6-4) was also significantly …” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • James Cochrane (Between You and I)
  • Paul Brians (Common Errors in English Usage)

The adjective “strait” ‘narrow, tight’ is pretty much restricted in modern English to the two expressions “straitjacket” and “strait-laced”, which most speakers seem to find opaque; its homophone “straight” at least makes some sense, especially in “straight-laced”, where there’s some possible connection to “straight” ‘conventional’. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (from which the two examples above come) notes: “The straight- spellings originated as errors, and they are still regarded as errors by many people [AMZ: Brians and Cochrane among them]. Because of their common occurrence in reputable publications, however, they are recognized as standard variants in almost all current dictionaries.”

Raw Google web hits on 10 April 2005 have the historical “straitjacket” over “straightjacket” by only 2 to 1, roughly (231k to 103k), but the innovative “straight-laced” over “strait-laced” by a similar ratio (104k to 47.8k).

[Added 24 August 2005: David’s comment, below, notes the correct “Straits of Magellan”. But this “strait”, too, very often turns up as “straight”: the Straights of Magellan, the Straight of Belle Isle (oddly paired with Northumberland Strait in the cite above), etc.]

| 7 comments | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/04/10 |

augurs » all goes

Chiefly in:   all goes well (for)

Classification: English – vocalized /l/

Spotted in the wild:

  • “IF RRL come out with an announcement re GOLD production to start getting a $$$flow it all goes well for Future exploration” (link)
  • “he almost got something from the game but despite losing late on Lisselton did show a marked improvement in form and it all goes well for the future.” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Paul Brians (Common Errors in English Usage)

See “augur” » “auger” for comments about the rarity of “augur”, which encourages its reshaping. Here things like “it augurs well (for)” are assimilated to the very common (and semantically similar) “it all goes well (for)”, as in “I hope it all goes well for you” ‘I hope things all go well for you’. The vocalization of l (as in “all”) and r (as in “augurs”) in some varieties of English might make some phonetic contribution to the reshaping.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/04/10 |

augur » auger

Chiefly in:   auger well (for)

Classification: English – questionable

Spotted in the wild:

  • “First and foremost, it doesn’t auger well for the state of science education in the United States.” (California Wild: The Magazine of the California Academy of Sciences, Keith K. Howell's editor's column, Spring 2005, p. 2)
  • “and augers well for the future of this validated course. … which augers well for the Commonwealth Games and European Championships later.” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Paul Brians (Common Errors in English Usage)

The verb “augur” ‘foretell’ occurs in modern English with any frequency only in the idiom “augur well/badly (for)”, so it’s ripe for respelling with the verb “auger”, related to the noun denoting a boring tool (though “auger” is itself a rather specialized word — just not as specialized as “augur”). The references treat this as a simple spelling error, and it might well be; the question is whether some people who use it think that boring is somehow involved in the meaning, perhaps though current states of affairs boring, metaphorically, into the future.

Certainly, the “auger” spelling is common: on 10 April 2005, I got ca. 12,400 raw Google web hits for “augers well for”, a respectable number in comparison to ca. 63,500 for “augurs well for”.

“Augurs” is reshaped more drastically in “all goes well (for)”, q.v.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/04/10 |

tenterhooks » tenderhooks

Chiefly in:   on tenderhooks

Classification: English – /t/-flapping

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Snooker: Nick left on tenderhooks. MANCHESTER professional Nick Dyson faces an anxious wait to find out whether he will still have a place…” (link)
  • “Home Page. Portus has hedge fund industry on tenderhooks. Project runs into stiff opposition by bank-owned firms” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Robert Hartwell Fiske (The Dictionary of Disagreeable English)
  • James Cochrane (Between You and I)

The “tenter” of “tenterhooks” — referring to a stretching device — is utterly unfamiliar to most English speakers, so it’s not surprising that some of them have replaced it by the familiar “tender”, suggesting the pain that comes from having hooks in tender places.

| 5 comments | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/04/10 |

moreover » morever

Variant(s):  more ever

Classification: English – questionable

Spotted in the wild:

I’ve labelled this one as “questionable” because the one-word version (morever), at least, could easily arise as a typographical error rather than a reanalysis. However, the examples I’ve shown here come from documents in which the word is consistently spelled this way on multiple occasions; the article from the Journal of Materials Chemistry, for example, contains four tokens of morever. It’s also quite a plausible reanalysis: the meaning of moreover, which is rather opaque, could just as sensibly be related to ‘more’ + ‘ever’ as to ‘more’ + ‘over’, and there are plenty of other -ever words (e.g., however, wherever, whatever) that could serve as analogues.

| Comments Off link | entered by Q. Pheevr, 2005/04/07 |