owe » own
Spotted in the wild:
- “Rhead became a huge success within the ceramics and pottery industry owning to his ability to adapt to changing tastes and new forms of art.” (link)
- “… to support the granting of a variance from the terms of the Billerica Zoning By-Law owning to circumstances relating to soil conditions, shape, …” (link)
- “Today, owning to several factors including government sector reform policy, the world-wide trend of rapid development in telecommunications and information …” (link)
- “Dell owns his success to the focusing on his customers…” (link)
- “ ‘I own my success to education.’ Kamen also describes his father as his personal hero, …” (link)
Analyzed or reported by:
- Linda Yanney (Usenet newsgroup soc.motss, 21 August 2005)
Although a fair number of the examples you can Google up were probably written by people who aren’t native speakers of English — Yanney provided an entertaining quotation from a French site on the deciphering of scripts — there’s still a big pile of clearly native cites, sampled above.
Yanney accounts for the semantics of the first cite above as follows: “Rhead owes his success to certain abilities; possessing, ‘owning,’ these abilities made his success possible.” The sense of personal possession is clear in the “own one’s success to” cites.
1
Commentary by Adina Levin , 2005/08/26 at 2:34 am
I’m no linguist, but this seems related to the idiom “owning up to”, meaning “taking responsibility for.”
2
Commentary by Beche-la-mer , 2005/09/04 at 11:50 am
Example of this in eggcorn in reverse:
I submitted an article to an Australian craft magazine, in which I wrote “Merle owns Prudence Mapstone as her inspiration”. When it came out in print I was horrified to see that it had been changed to “Merle owes Prudence Mapstone as her inspiration”.