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precedent » president

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “The designs created by him and his colleagues set a president in Victorian style.” (Artist Biographies)
  • “That case set a president in custody cases.” (link)

‘President’ is obviously seen as a word with connotations of importance… so ‘to set a precedent’, something would have to be important, or would at least be so after it was deemed a precedent, like a president. Also, perhaps, a reanalysis deriving from ‘presides.’

| Comments Off link | entered by Sravana Reddy, 2005/03/26 |

pass muster » pass mustard

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion

Spotted in the wild:

  • … then there should be no problem for those candidates with even the smallest minority of support (10% is certainly a reasonable minimum), to pass mustard. … (link)
  • … authentic swipes at the dreaded Hot Rod genre herein, the coolest by far is the band’s own composition, “Shelby GT 356″ which would easily pass mustard on the … (link)
  • … best to value industries and stocks within them, and finally we show how to write a really lazy column but make it look good enough to pass mustard, at least … (link)

About 520 Google net hits on 25 March 2005, though some of these are about passing actual mustard.

“Mustard” is hugely more familiar a word than “muster”, so the reshaping isn’t entirely surprising. Perhaps the sharpness and spiciness of mustard is part of the semantic appeal of the reshaping; “mustard” suggests a difficult test to pass.

In a sci.lang discussion (25 March 2005) of “pass a mustard” in the writing of a poster (who is possibly not a native speaker of English), Ross Clark suggested hybridization (that is, idiom blending) of “pass muster” with “cut the mustard”.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/03/25 |

surname » sirname

Variant(s):  sirname, sir-name

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • All we know about it is that the men who got up the petition made up this name from certain letters found in the sir-names of the signers. (Schoolcraft County Pioneer (Manistique, Mich.), vol. 3, no. 35 (Dec. 23, 1882), pg. 3)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • acw, Mark Liberman, et al. (link)
| Comments Off link | entered by JamesOfMichigan, 2005/03/25 |

invaluable » unvaluable

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

While some of the occurences are conscious plays on ‘invaluable’ for a sarcastic note, a lot are genuine. I suppose that once people have absorbed the counterintuitive use of ‘in-’ in the word, they start equating any negation of ‘valuable’ with it.

[Or so I thought… but ‘disvaluable’ in that sense is pretty much non-existent. I guess the phonetic closeness has a part to play too.]

| Comments Off link | entered by Sravana Reddy, 2005/03/25 |

breadth » breath

Chiefly in:   a hair's breath

Classification: English – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • He had won by a hair’s breath - somehow, some way - with a hidden reserve that he hadn’t known was in him. (link)
  • Even in this age of fast food and automation, our body’s natural balancing mechanism brings us within a hair’s breath of weight equilibrium. (link)

See also [_hair > hare_](eggcorns.lascribe.net/eng…) and [_hair’s breadth > hare’s breath_](eggcorns.lascribe.net/eng…)

| Comments Off link | entered by thiebes, 2005/03/24 |
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