wind chill » Winchell

Chiefly in:   Winchell factor

Classification: English – questionable

Spotted in the wild:

  • Isn’t it just a tad convenient that Winchell’s factor of 80 is 1/100th of his date of deglaciation, which allows his scheme to match Hotchkiss’s minimum 100 years of age? (soc.history.medieval, Jun 12, 2003)
  • Much more freedom that way; allows you to wear pants in Kansas when the Winchell factor is 40 below. (alt.religion.kibology, Mar 2, 1999)

Analyzed or reported by:

Richard Fontana admits:

> I remember thinking (in third grade) that the Wind Chill Factor
> was the Winchell Factor.

Still on alt.usage.english, Maria Conlon analyzes:

> By the way, we also have a Winchell Factor, but we don’t pronounce it
quite that way. Anyway, I think the Factor is a creation of TV stations
that want to make even the weather more sensational a story than it is.

This eggcorn seems to stem from a pun, but some occurrences may be genuine.

| 3 comments | link | entered by piedrasyluz, 2005/02/24 |

charm » champ

Chiefly in:   works like a champ

Classification: English – questionable

Spotted in the wild:

  • We just installed the new version of Exchange in the test lab, and it is working like a champ. (Heard in the wild, at my job, and it is spreading like wildfire.)
  • But if you use the program to recover deleted or corrupted images, it works like a champ. (PC World)
  • Lots of work still needed to be done to get the waterguns up to snuff; Byron modified one by finding a way to insert a long hose into the water intake and take the Chinese spring out and modify it with parts from our dead Italian watergun and voila it worked like a champ. (link)

I am fairly certain that “Works like a charm” is the original, but interestingly enough, a Google search of both phrases occurring in the same resource returns a shocking number of results:

Google:”works like a champ” “works like a charm”

Over 1,780 results!

[Entered by Neil and edited by Ben Zimmer. Marked “questionable” because it should probably be classified as an idiom blend, combining _works like a charm_ with _(do something) like a champ_.]

| 3 comments | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/02/24 |

playwright » playwrite

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • A man who played a part of my youth passed away last week. It was playwrite Arthur Miller. Maybe his most famous play was “Death of a Salesman”. But the one that’s most important to me was “The Crucible”. (link)
  • The haunting story of playwrite Oakley Hall’s life and work, full of rich insights into the loss that occurs when a creative voice is suddenly silenced by tragedy. (Brandenton Herald, Jan. 23, 2005)
  • It follows the story of Barton Fink, played by John Tuturro, who is a playwrite who has a hit show in NY in 1941, which attracts the attention of Hollywood moguls. (link)
  • Barrie is working as a playwrite, a talented one who has not been able to grasp that story that captures the imagination of his audience. (Blogcritics.org)
  • Vision Theatre Players Guild presents the comedy “Trading Spaces” by local playwrite Anna Lussenburg Mar. 3, 4, 5 at the Cochrane RancheHouse. (Cochrane Times, January 26, 2005)

Analyzed or reported by:

Several major dictionaries define _playwright_ laconically as “a person who writes plays”, which doesn’t help to clarify the matter for those who consult them.

The Columbia Guide to Standard American English explains:

> A _playwright_, like a _shipwright_, makes or builds something (the word _wright_ comes from an Old English form of _worker_ and is related to _wrought_); to _write plays_ is to do _playwriting_, although the _playwrighting_ spelling also occurs. Edited English usually insists that a maker of plays is a _playwright_ and that the craft be called _playwriting_, not _playwrighting_.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris W. (admin), 2005/02/23 |

slings » stings

Chiefly in:   stings and arrows

Classification: English – citational

Spotted in the wild:

  • To be or not to be that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the stings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing them, end them. (TPCN Great Quotations)
  • Sovereignties are often seen in a battle arrayed in shining armor and civilizations tend to fall between these tools and suffer the stings and arrows of misfortune. (UNESCO)
  • Liberals have since the founding of this country moved it FORWARD. Unflinchingly and with tremendous courage. They have taken the stings and arrows of their fellow man and turned them into the reason for their struggle. (link)

“stings and arrows” gets 331 hits on Google

“slings and arrows”, gets 130,000 hits on Google

The original is from Hamlet’s Shakespeare, and it is a biblical reference, I believe.

On the SHAKSPER mailing list, Hardy M. Cook reports:

> But this time I got up and pulled down Harold Jenkins’s Arden edition and
checked his footnotes. Although Jenkins suspects that the line should read
“stings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” he cites no examples of the arrows
of fortune. (Neither does the Furness variorum.)
>
> I checked the OED1 under “slings,” and found example after example of the union
of “slingers and archers, slings and bows”–the light artillery of
pre-gunpowder warfare. Jenkins found only one example in Golding’s translation
of Caesar’s Gallic Wars. I see no need for an emendation of
“slings” to “stings.” Under “fortune,” I found no reference to “fortune’s
arrows.” […]
>
> Both “slings” and “arrows” had a figurative use by Shakespeare’s time (and
probably much earlier), indicating the “power” of certain abstractions. So, one
could talk about, say, the slings of conscience. Perhaps there was no
tradition in which Fortune was pictured as an archer.

See also _strings and arrows_.

| 1 comment | link | entered by glyphobet, 2005/02/22 |

locus » locust

Chiefly in:   locust of control

Classification: English – cross-language

Spotted in the wild:

  • What I found most appealing about Mr. Schwarz is that he is very proactive about his cause. He makes a point to stay involved in the community and educate others, all the while helping himself. I immediately thought about the locust of control theory of psychology which states that there are individuals who have either an internal or external locust of control. Those individuals with an external locust of control feel that they are in less control of their life and that the control lay outside their autonomy. (Klinefelter Syndrome, student interview)
  • When the locust of responsibility and control has returned to you, change is possible. (Bodybuilding.com)
  • Business education programs that offer an innovative and interesting opportunity for students to pursue their personal interests and place the locust of control with the student will see a resurgence of student enrollment. (James L. Stapleton, Southern Illinois University)
  • The distributed resources would be aligned with major academic divisions, but could be extended to other areas that were the locust of major support needs. (Bucknell University)
  • What one has to see here is that the connection between governance and academic freedom is absolutely central to what we’re talking about, and that in a sense, the locust of decision-making is really what academic freedom is all about, that especially as issues become much more complicated. (UC Berkeley)
  • With respect to averaging vectors and rotations, perhaps the most appropriate approach would be one that rejects your fundamental assumption — that is, maybe you shouldn’t average at all. Consider preserving a locust of vectors and their associated rotations, and instead think about ways to present your data which can express all this information, instead of “hiding” it as a mean. (link)
  • The reason Benjamin chooses this particular time and place is because nineteenth century Paris was the locust of a booming capitalist epistemology. (Connecticut College)

_Locusts_, mainly in the abstract singular _the locust of …_, have entered figurative language via the biblical reference to the destructive swarms that consumed the crops in Egypt (the eighth of the ten plagues), and the locusts of the apocalypse. The metaphor for an overwhelming, all-devouring force is found in modern Christian-revivalist wrtiting, as in:

* _I will raise up an army of disciples and apostles in you. Ambassadors of Christ, minister’s of reconciliation. They will enter the land with a sound of preparation and restoration. They will restore the years that the locust of war have devoured. Mighty peacemakers will come from you Yugoslavia._ (link)
* _The fruit of hard parental labor was devoured by the locust of humanistic values, never to yield a truly bountiful harvest for the Lord._ (link)

From there it is only a step to a secular metaphor:

* _Pakistan was still in its first innocence, the fervour and idealism of independence lingering in the air and the locust of military rule that was to descend on the land soon – never really to leave – the last thing on anyone’s mind._ (link)

The expression _a locust of …_ also came to denote “a great number of”, maybe via the metonymy _locust»swarm_, as suggested by Nathan Bierma in his article of November 10, 2004, for the Chicago Tribune:

> Election night is when newscasters turn off their teleprompters and let their language run wild. Analyst David Gergen commented to CNN’s Lou Dobbs that Ohio and Florida were host to a “locust of lawyers” (using “locust” to mean “swarm,” because locusts swarm — columnist George Will had used the term “locust litigation”).

Other rather more obscure occurences of _a locust of …_ may be linked to this sense:

* _Is Arnold capable of leading this state, let alone this country… let alone this generation? I say no — but not because he is a Republican or that he will lead a locust of special interests into California._ (link)
* _I often day dream I have magical powers, sort of like Matilda. I would make people do funny things, start a locust of little teeny-tiny yellow fuzzy baby chicks and make a dessert buffet table appear out of nowhere._ (link)

None of these considerations explain the substitution _locus»locust_, but they provide an already rather fuzzy backdrop for it.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/22 |