The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

After Ken Rudolph supplied the first cite above, I googled up lots of “X magnet” ‘X tycoon’ examples, for X = shipping, newspaper, mining, textile, oil, publishing, business, real estate, liquor, automobile, fashion. Undoubtedly there are more.

There are also many occurrences of “X magnet” referring to something, someplace, or someone that attracts X. This is a possible
contribution to the replacement of the rare “magnate” ‘tycoon’ by the much more common “magnet”: an X magnate is someone who attracts X business(es) to himself (or, much more rarely, herself).

Unfortunately, as Jed Davis pointed out on soc.motss on 17 October 2005, there are also hundreds of references to “magnate schools” (for “magnet schools”), which suggests that MWDEU might be right in thinking that there is just a spelling confusion here. Not (yet) in Brians, for what that’s worth. In any case, I’ve labeled it as questionable.

Marked questionable, since as Arnold Zwicky writes in the ADS-L thread, this looks “blendish rather than eggcornish” — perhaps blending caused X to lose his job (etc.) with cost X his job (etc.). (The example from the New York Times Magazine, which sparked the ADS-L discussion, is further complicated by the coordination with caused X a reprimand.)

[Edited on 25 Oct 2005 to incorporate new examples suggested by Brenda Shaw.]

There are expressions that have eggcorns in their history — “cockroach”, “humble pie”, “muskrat”, to choose three of many examples from Michael Quinion’s Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds — but have now lost all tinges of their etymological sources. The eggcorn database would be be considerably swollen if we catalogued the reinterpretations that have gone to completion for all English speakers (except etymological enthusiasts). But every so often a hard nut comes along, and “Hobbesian choice” is one of them.

“Hobson’s choice”, for no choice at all, has been around since 1660, during the lifetime of the inflexible stable-keeper Hobson (c. 1544-1631), an otherwise unremarkable and minor figure in history. OED2 has the adjective “Hobbesian” (from the name of political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan was published in 1660) from 1776, but no cites at all for “Hobbesian choice”. So far the earliest cite for “Hobbesian choice” is the Wall Street Journal letter from 1984 (from the 2003 STUMPERS-L discussion). Perhaps the hounds of antedating will find an earlier cite, but it seems unlikely that it will get pushed back more than twenty years — still very very much later than 1660.

The obvious interpretation of these facts, which I suggested in my ADS-L postings and Mark Liberman proposed in his Language Log posting, is that Hobbes’s name got grafted onto Hobson’s, thanks to the phonological similarity in their names and to Hobbes’s much greater reputation. That’s some kind of malaprop, perhaps even an eggcorn.

But “Hobbesian” now seems to have an independent life of its own, with some sort of reference to Hobbes’s ideas, not just his name. Exactly what this reference is depends on who you read: a choice between life in the state of nature and life under an arbitrary and absolute government, as Viterriti has it in the first cite; a choice between nasty, brutish, and short, as Larry Horn waggishly suggested on ADS-L; or a choice between any two unacceptable alternatives (as in the second cite, from a 25 October 2003 column by Edgar J. Steele), which amounts to no choice at all (an idea explicit in Viterriti’s letter). This last possibility brings us back to Hobson, suggesting that “Hobson’s choice” might still play a role for some people in the interpretation of “Hobbesian choice”.

To further complicate matters, the citation that Liberman led with on Language Log — from a New York Magazine column by Kurt Anderson — turns out to have involved what Anderson later claimed was a clever pun.

So it’s a real possibility that some people are producing “Hobbesian choice” as a jokey play on “Hobson’s Choice”; that others have (eggcornically) replaced the obscure “Hobson’s” by the more familiar “Hobbesian”; and that still others simply have two expressions, somewhat related in meaning: “Hobson’s choice”, an opaque idiom, versus “Hobbesian choice”, with an allusion to the ideas of Hobbes.

The reverse of “averse” >> “adverse”, and apparently rarer than it; see that entry for discussion. Fiske’s Dictionary of Disagreeable English, however, treats this direction of substitution as the more common one, citing examples of “averse effects”, “averse reactions”, and “averse weather”. Google searches do not bear out Fiske’s assessment of relative frequency. Still, it’s not hard to find hundreds of examples.

The question is whether this is mere word confusion — perhaps encouraged by advice to avoid the substitution “averse” >> “adverse”! — or an actual eggcorn. As far as I can tell, this comes down to the question of whether some people see a connection between “averse” and “aversion” and import “averse” into contexts like ” — circumstances” and ” — weather” so as to highlight the unwelcome nature of the circumstances, weather, etc. I’m not at all sure that this has happened, and so have marked this entry as questionable.

Marked questionable, since _airways_ may be an accepted variant of _airwaves_, arising out of usage in radio broadcasting. The _Oxford English Dictionary_ lists this sense in the entry for _airway_:

3. A radio channel (cf. AIR n.1 1c). U.S.

1934 in M. WESEEN Dict. Amer. Slang xii. 165. 1946 Baltimore Sun 10 Oct. 18/8 By that time a radio broadcaster had appeared with a portable microphone but Ted had nothing for the airways, even after most of the other players had taken their turns at the ‘mike’.

From _Merriam-Webster Collegiate_:

4 : a channel of a designated radio frequency for broadcasting or other radio communication

And from _Random House Unabridged_:

5. airways,
a. the band of frequencies, taken collectively, used by radio broadcasting stations: The news was sent out over the airways immediately.
b. airwaves.

It’s possible, of course, that the ‘radio frequency’ sense of _airway(s)_ started off as an eggcorn which then gained acceptance in some quarters. But it’s notable that many news outlets such as the New York Times chose to “correct” Pres. Bush’s Sep. 12, 2005 usage of _airways_ (as it appears even in the official White House transcript), replacing it with _airwaves_.

[Edit, CW, 2005/10/14: see also _parting of the waves_.]