The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

It is only very rarely that we enter non-eggcorns into the database, but I am making an exception for _ad homonym_.

First of all, homonyms — or rather, homophones, i.e. words that sound alike but aren’t necessarily spelled alike — enter into the genesis of eggcorns themselves.

Second, because the _ad homonym_ malapropism illustrates very nicely what elements are required to make an eggcorn: it is a non-standard reshaping of an established term (check!), _homonym_ and _hominem_ are pronounced nearly the same (check!), but it _isn’t_ a re-interpretation that is based on (a correct understanding of the semantics of) the target word _homonym_.

In a typical eggcorn, the writer understands the sense of the word he or she actually employs; the problem is that the use takes up the place already occupied by a different word, often part of a set phrase. Here, however, the eggcorn users don’t give any sign that they know what a homonym is. In one of the examples, the writer obviously believes that _ad homonym_ means _against the man_ in Latin. It’s the Latin that is faulty, along with the recollection of what the expression is supposed to be, precisely. (And spell-checkers might have had their bit to add, too. Case in point: the spell-checker I just used on this entry didn’t know _hominem_ and suggested _hominid_. _Ad hominid_ also yields over a hundred Google hits, compared to several thousand for _ad homonym(s)_.)

The replacement of a “complicated phrase” by another “complicated phrase” is rarely an eggcorn: often, the writer is unclear about the meaning of both, not only about the original.

The word prowess is now quite opaque, the relevant sense of prow (an etymological doublet of proud) being long since obsolete. The semantic, orthographic, and phonological similarity between prowess and power makes poweress a very natural reanalysis.

(Searching for instances of this eggcorn is made slightly more difficult by the existence of something called PowerESS, in which the ESS stands for “Employee Self-Service.” On Google, limiting the search to English pages helps a great deal.)

This astonishing reanalysis was just suggested by Wes Munsil, who “wonders what mental model this usage reflects”. Indeed. It’s not even that rare.

ADDENDUM, following orionrobots’ question in the comments.

The eggcorn is puzzling: Most of our collection involve not more than a misunderstood lexical item, or maybe change morphemes or function words. This one, though, takes a rare but perfectly normal transitive verb and creates a) a predicative structure “(it would) be X”; b) an indirect question “who of (you, them, us …)”, which takes the place of the predicative complement X; c) the preposition “of”, which takes what would have been the complement of “behoove” as an argument. The result is grammatical. “Who of me” doesn’t seem to make much sense, but I’ll come to that later.

There are of course irrelevant (non-eggcorn) examples of this:

* We are waging a presidential election in this country at this very moment, the major issue of which seems to be who of these two men is the greatest warrior? (link)

For “would be who of”, the eggcorn takes over, but some examples are still perfectly commonplace:

* An interesting one would be who of our players has consistently failed against the Kangaroos (under Pagan). (link)

Here’s an example I didn’t include — I think it is the eggcorn, but maybe the passage shows how it might have arisen: imagine the question being asked provocatively: “Who of you would consider it?! Well, you should.”

* I have compassion for the plight of those who’re suffering in the hell hole that is New Orleans. But I have very little sympathy. From this time forward, when you’re advised about a “mandatory evacuation,” it would be who of you to consider it, especially if you want any moral consideration of your “Monday Morning Quarterbacking” after the emergency.(link)

For “it would be who of me to [do something]” to make sense, the new structure must have crystallized into an idiom for some speakers. I nearly wrote that it would be unlikely to find eggcornified “it behooves you”, but digging a little further…

* The doctor doesn’t know the Mafia’s choice, so it is who of him/her to protect valuable townspeople and hope the others do not get shot. If somebody asks and you are the doctor, you MUST say so.(Google cache link, from the description of a role playing game)
* This is also why I try to stay current on what the afroementioned nine wise in Washington do. Their case law changes all the time, and it is who of us to keep abreast. That is good civics. (link)

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.

At this point, Google only has about 175 hits for ‘hack-kneed’, many on blogs or book-, movie-, or tv-review pages.

The new term seems to be less an observation that the subject is overworked, and more an observation that it is somehow feeble, or ‘weak in the knees’.

[Draft edited and posted by CW, 2005/10/14]