mosh » marsh

Chiefly in:   marsh pit

Classification: English – /r/-dropping

Spotted in the wild:

  • By the way, I went the Boingo concert on November 1. It was good! The marsh pit went crazy over “Insanity” and “Dead Man’s Party.” (alt.fan.oingo-boingo, Nov. 3, 1994)
  • Today, the plaintiffs played the 30-second ad tune, titled “Mosh Pit 2″ by its songwriter (and repeatedly called “Marsh Pit” by Judge Henry Hupp). (E! Online, May 7, 1997)
  • i turned on m t.v and it looked like a documenty on marsh pits and slug fests. […] all i remembered back in the days when u went into a marsh pit all u could find were fat chicks pierces and tatooed all over talk about taking that to the next level and starting a health club that teaches u things to do in a marsh pit. (Lafoot blog post, May 5, 2002)
  • Right now when all the 7th grade students enter the building or return from lunch the scene in the halls reminds one of a marsh pit at a rock concert. (Bedford (NH) School District Annual Report, Feb. 10, 2005)
  • It was like a marsh-pit at a No Doubt concert, only thing there were not only people, but cars/bikes/scooters/autos also in the marsh-pit. (rec.sport.cricket, Mar. 28, 2005)
  • I knew there would defiantly be a marsh pit but yet again another crowd surfer only hit me once. (Stupid-Boy forum post, Mar. 22, 2006)
  • many ppl who marsh pit can dance. but i have been in many a pit where each and every stupid, wanna-be-punk-rock-jock in there thought that the point of marshing was to hit and push as many people as they could, before getting knocked over. (UTRave.org forum post, Mar. 26, 2006)

Analyzed or reported by:

As with sought after » sort after and others, this eggcorn works best for non-rhotic English speakers who have mosh and marsh as rough homonyms (/mɑː∫/). But it appears that many rhotic Americans also use this substitution, presumably because of an unfamiliarity with the slam-dancing sense of mosh and mosh pit (terms that emerged from the hard-core punk scene in the early ’80s). The reanalysis of mosh pit (area in front of a stage where concertgoers mosh) as marsh pit makes a certain sense, since as Ken Lakritz points out “from a distance, it looks like a swamp (or marsh) of bodies.”

| link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2006/05/22 |

Commentaries

  1. 1

    Commentary by Travis Hedglin , 2006/05/28 at 12:29 am

    A mosh pit, was a slang term for the pit that was dug to recieve and contain waste in an outhouse.

  2. 2

    Commentary by Nancy Hall , 2006/08/24 at 11:49 am

    There are American dialects that have “warsh” for “wash”, “Warshington” for “Washington”. The insertion of [r] in “mosh” (which for me rhymes with “wash”) could be part of the same phonological process.

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