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furrow » furl

Chiefly in:   furl one's brow , furled brow

Classification: English – vocalized /l/

Spotted in the wild:

  • Krohn’s furled brow and witty demeanor sharply criticizes his son, Douglas. (Univ. of Houston Daily Cougar, Apr. 20, 1999)
  • As the de rigueur firebrand villain Chauvelin, William Michals furls his brow and supplies a dosage of testosterone that gives the evening genuine pizzazz. (Cleveland Scene, Mar. 8, 2001)
  • Frances furls her brow, because she doesn’t really want to marry one of her past boyfriends, move to California and work in the Industry. (Harvard Crimson, Dec. 6, 2001)
  • As she furled her brow and continued her noontime walk, Jaworski called her friend on a cellular phone to vent. (New Britain Herald, CT, Mar. 21, 2003)
  • He gave an affirmative nod and furled his brow. (Notre Dame Magazine, Autumn 2003)
  • When she furls her brow and sprints her 100 meters at a pace appropriate for someone taking new steps, her long hair bounces behind her in a ponytail held by two scrunchies. (Pak Tribune, June 7, 2004)
  • Butch’s game may have been as pretty as a personalized photo of Lyle Lovett, especially because he played with that furled brow and tried to look mean as he scored while losing his balance or was parked on his butt after taking a charge. (Capital Times, Madison, WI, Dec. 4, 2004)

The verb _furrow_ ‘to crease’ is seldom used beyond the set phrase _furrow one’s brow_, and the original allusion to trenches in plowed fields has largely faded from the collective memory. _Furl_ ‘to roll up’ is similarly uncommon (its opposite, _unfurl_, appears with much greater frequency, though almost always in reference to flags or sails). Apparently, the rolling/curling/folding connotation of _furl_ supplies enough semantic justification for the term to be applied to wrinkled brows.

The _Oxford English Dictionary_ lists a sense of _furl_ meaning ‘to furrow,’ but it’s marked obsolete, with citations coming from the 17th-18th centuries:

1681 J. CHETHAM Angler’s Vade-m. x. §1 (1689) 98 Cloudy and windy day that furls the Water.
1742 SHENSTONE Schoolmistr. 261 He..furls his wrinkly front, and cries, ‘What stuff is here!’
a1763 — Odes, etc. (1765) 206 Nor bite your lip, nor furl your brow.

| Comments Off link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/07/20 |

qualm » quorum

Classification: English – questionable – vocalized /l/

Spotted in the wild:

  • Thanks for listening to my quorums about Seth. (NCD Tau Beta Sigma Secretary-Treasurer Report, 2000)
  • But at the end of the day, no mistake should be made: the twelve fraternal members of the SEC are at a crossroads, trying to balance their collective commitment towards being the most celebrated football conference in the nation with eradicating its newfound image of being maverick institutions with no quorums about bypassing a few NCAA rules. (Acceleration Online, Oct. 4, 2002)
  • I have no quorums about my disability. I’ve been wearing two artificial legs since 1947. (Lookout, CFB Esquimalt, Nov. 8, 2004)
  • Today we say that our society has no quorums about peoples sexual preferences. (Woman On The Edge of Time, review)

Marked questionable, since there doesn’t seem to be much of a semantic connection between _qualm_ and _quorum_… unless of course one feels uneasy about having the minimum number of members to conduct business.

| Comments Off link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/07/20 |

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 |

salchow » sowchow

Classification: English – cross-language – vocalized /l/

Spotted in the wild:

  • I’m doing a tripel Sowchow, toe and loop. (link)
  • There are different types of jumps in figure skating a edge jump and pick jump a pick jump is a toe loop, flip and lutze, some edge jumps are waltz jump axel sowchow and loop. (link)

This is a rarer variant of the _salchow » sowcow_ eggcorn. See that entry for further remarks.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/04/01 |

salchow » sowcow

Classification: English – cross-language – vocalized /l/

Spotted in the wild:

  • Another big moment the same year was “the first time I did a double sowcow: […”] (link)
  • I really love watching brian skate and it was a honor to skate with him at stars on ice with the minnesota special olympics thanks for all his help with my double sowcow. (link)
  • The G-rated skating flick, starring Michelle Trachtenberg, Hayden Panettiere as rink rivals and (Joan Cusack and Kim Cattrall as their moms, couldn’t land the sowcow. Targeted at tweens on spring break, Ice Princess averaged a frosty $2,804 at 2,501 theaters. (Yahoo! Movie reviews)
  • Because they knew the competition would be tough that year, they decided to attempt the “triple-lutz-sowcow-off-the-dishwasher-nothing-but-net” move (as seen in “the cutting edge”). (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • desperate hours productions blog (link)

The _salchow_, sometimes referred to as _Salchow jump_ is a figure skating jump named after the Swedish figure skater Ulrich Salchow (1877-1949). Occasionally, we find the rarer form _sowchow_.

Names for athletic moves and maneuvers don’t really have to make much sense. Eggcorn users may be satisfied to suppose that the term is an obscure or jocular allusion to sows and cows.

The error can occur in other languages than English — a pan-linguistic eggcorn? This is from a young figure skater writing in French, who, however, is unsure of the spelling:

> Je suis un garçon et je fais du patin depuis 3 ans. Je fait le sowchow (je pense que ça s’écrit comme ça), le saut de valse, saut de lapin, cherry flip. Je suis rendu à l’étape 4 et j’ai eu ma première médaille d’or il y a moins de 3 semaines, à Longueuil. C’était ma 2ème compétition.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/04/01 |
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