Language Log

From Ryan North yesterday:

with an explanation, and a plug for LLog:

WHAT ARE THE HAPS MY FRIENDS

November 17th, 2010: This comic and all the eggcorns in it come from the wonderful Language Log and the eggcorn database.

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Barbara Phillips Long sent in a striking eggcorn that she spotted in a comment on a story in the Baltimore Sun:

401K fund managers have been ripping off employees blind for the past 30 years. the employers have known this and have hidden this from the employees. the SEC has known this, but really doesn't care or have the wear-with-all to go after every single 401K management firm because many of them are divisions within large financial firms that lobby congress every year to keep a lid on it. [emphasis added]

This one seems not to be in the eggcorn database yet (Bob Cunningham, "Eagles' Andy Reid Making a Huge Mistake Not Starting Reggie Wells", philly.com 10/2/2010):

[Max] Jean-Gilles belongs on a run-first team. He can be a road-grater due to his size, but when it comes to the athleticism needed to play guard on a pass-first team, Jean-Gilles doesn't even come close to passing that test. [emphasis added]

"Once so ever" for whatsoever is a surprisingly common eggcorn that hasn't yet been catalogued in the Eggcorn Database. Some examples:

He has no experience once so ever.
Those people make no sense once so ever and I think I'll just stay over here at /film.
I tried to cut gluten out for several weeks that made no change once so ever.
So we all finally get on and to my amazement there is absolutely no instruction once so ever!
Love when Bush was president, he had no problems once so ever.
i doubt one person moderating is going to make any difference once so ever.
Sigourney Weaver is very good in this five minute opening scene that throws us directly into the fire without any set up once so ever.
Apparently, they agreed as I was hired rather quikly, "just as everyone else was with no experience in sales once so ever.

This is an auspicious moment: a Language Log-ism has been entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. The latest quarterly update for the online revision of the OED includes this note:

eggcorn n.

As early as 1844, people were reinterpreting the word “acorn” as “eggcorn”, either deliberately, for humorous purposes, or in all innocence, in a struggle to analyse, in a way that made sense to them, what the word’s spelling must be: acorns are, after all, seeds which are somewhat egg-shaped, and in many dialects the formations acorn and eggcorn sound very similar. Since 2003, it has become a widely accepted term for this category of words as a whole, appearing in books and journals, and on the internet, often alongside its musical sibling, the mondegreen or misheard lyric (which first appeared in the OED in 2002). As such, it has now become an autological word: one which belongs to the category it describes.

Could that famously well-edited publication be the source of one of those sporadic folk-etymologies that we call eggcorns? Sure: see "And every lion tongue cast down", 8/1/2005. The mistake discussed there is more of a mondegreen, but it involves the same sort of creative mis-hearing.  However, the example that Ian Leslie sent in this morning, taken from Anthony Lane's review of The Expendables, is more ambiguous:

Stallone, who co-wrote the movie with Dave Callaham, is also listed as the director, but since he appears to be having trouble, in the autumn of his years, getting his eyelids and lower lip to act in consort with the rest of him, I’m hardly surprised that he had no energy left over to command the film. [emphasis added]

"Shouldn't that be 'in concert with'?", Ian asked. The answer, it appears, is "Well,  yes, in a statistical sense, at least since the end of the 18th century".

Kevin L. has sighted a lovely specimen (Neave Barker, "Heatwave may rekindle Chernobyl's curse", Aljazeera.net 8/11/2010):

Today the winds have changed and the skies over the capital have cleared, a welcome rest bite for thousands of people doomed to spend sweltering nights in overheated apartments with the windows firmly closed.

Another problem of attributional abduction, this one from Josh Marshall, "So How'd it go?", TPM 7/31/2010:

Our reporting duo gives us the round down of just what happened at today's pro-diversity 'Uni-Tea' Tea Party rally in Philadelphia.

Alexa O writes:

My daughter, who is two, loves corn. She loves it so much that she talks about it all the time. Since she is two and also loves eggs, she calls it "eggcorn."

On a whim, my mother wiki-ed "eggcorn" and, lo and behold, we discovered your term.

I can't tell you how excited I was, because I love saying "eggcorn" (was there ever a more satisfying set of syllables?) and now I have an excuse to do so even after my daugther stops asking to eat it.

I was even more excited when I found the various websites, including the Language Log and The Eggcorn Database, that gave so many delicious examples of said phenomenon.

An eggcorn that hasn't yet been catalogued: "par none" for "bar none". I've mislaid the link where I first saw this, but there are plenty of examples on the web, from the realtor who advertises herself as providing "Service par none" to the hotel review titled "Excellence par none".

If you have even a passing interest in crosswords, you may know the legendary name of Merl Reagle, whose syndicated Sunday puzzle appears in many major newspapers (the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, etc.). In the 2006 documentary Wordplay, he gave a stunning demonstration of his pencil-and-paper method of constructing crosswords, and in 2008 he showed up in an episode of The Simpsons with New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz.

Reagle, it turns out, is an eggcorn enthusiast, and for this Sunday's puzzle he managed to squeeze ten twelve eggcorns into the grid. Though most are included in the Eggcorn Database, a couple of them have only appeared in the forum. All are clued with Reagle's signature wit.

You can solve the puzzle online here in its Java version, or print out the PDF here.

"Egbert's, a custom car shop at this location since 1992, specializes in restoring and building unique cars to disconcerting customers", says the website for Egbert's, a company that designs and restores hotrods and collectible cars for street use. I am quite sure that by "to" they meant "for". And although perhaps some of the tattooed customers who bring in muscle cars to have skull motifs or gang insignia incorporated into the paintwork may be a bit disconcerting, surely they must have meant that they restore and build cars for discerning customers.

Via Nancy Friedman's Twitter feed comes this lovely eggcorn, in a comment on the New York Times Opinionator blog:

NOW is in the wrong fight. The issues should be about access to affordable healthcare and jobs. Without addressing these issues, NOW and others have nothing to offer the average Jane and in consequence, have allowed Sarah Palin and her elk to define women's issues.

There's nothing in the comment to suggest that this substitution was the result of intentional wordplay, but it's hard not to think that the slip was influenced by Palin's well-documented love of hunting big game in Alaska like moose and caribou. (Not sure about the elk, though. See Bill Poser's post and comments thereon for an explanation of the difference between North American moose and elk.) And perhaps the commenter is from a part of the country where milk is pronounced as [mɛlk] (say, Pittsburgh, Utah, or Washington State), rendering ilk and elk homophonous, or nearly so. Add the fact that ilk is a low-frequency word that lingers in crystallized idiomatic usage ("of X's ilk," "X and his/her/its/their ilk"), and it's clear to see that this is a prime candidate for eggcornization.