Helpmate
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David Bloom writes to point out that Wiktionary has adopted eggcorn as a technical term, at least in the etymology for helpmate:
Originally an eggcorn of helpmeet, but now standard English.
The OED's etymology for helpmate is a bit more circumspect:
< help n. or help v. + mate adj.; probably influenced in origin by helpmeet n.
David observes that
… "helpmate" seems to be a double eggcorn, the original "helpmeet" having a pretty comical etymology in its own right.
The Wiktionary's version of that etymology:
From a misinterpreting of the phrase in Genesis 2:18 "an help meet" for Adam (i.e. suitable for him).
And the OED's etymology, which agrees while providing a bit more historical detail, along with some editorial evaluation:
A compound absurdly formed by taking the two words help meet in Gen. ii. 18, 20 (‘an help meet for him’, i.e. a help (help n. 2) suitable for him) as one word.
Already in the 17th cent. the Scripture phrase is found with the two words improperly hyphened; which led the way to the use of help-meet , helpmeet , without ‘for him’. But its recognition as a ‘word’ is chiefly of the 19th cent.: it is unknown to Johnson, Todd, Richardson, and to Webster 1832. In the 17th cent. they used more grammatically meet help , meet-help : compare sweet heart , sweetheart .
The origin of "helpmeet" as a re-analysis of a phrasal fragment is certainly eggcorn-like, but something else is going on as well. I can't offhand think of any other "compound[s] absurdly formed" in a similar way, but there must be some.
Markonsea said,
December 10, 2011 @ 7:32 pm
Are we getting to the interface between eggcorns and mondegreens?
[(myl) It's certainly true that mondegreens often involve lexical reanalysis of phrasal fragments (e.g. "Laid him on the green" → "Lady Mondegreen").]
Tom Recht said,
December 10, 2011 @ 7:46 pm
"Derring-do" is another, as was once discussed on Language Hat.
Eric TF Bat said,
December 10, 2011 @ 7:47 pm
I do not like it, Sam I Am,
I do not like mondeegreen eggcorns and ham!
andrew said,
December 10, 2011 @ 7:59 pm
the reverse of whatever we call "helpmeet" is found in theocritus' syrinx: at the beginning of the iliad, homer says that achilles and agamemnon "stood apart" (διὰ στήτην) as the result of their quarrel. theocritus jokingly takes this phrase to mean "because of a στήτη," which means nothing in greek but which theocritus uses in his poem to mean "woman." so one reading the syrinx carefully (and credulously) might think that homer had said that achilles and agamemnon had quarrelled "because of a woman."
Brett said,
December 10, 2011 @ 8:35 pm
"Culprit" came from a concatenation of Latin abbreviations, used at the beginning of legal documents and misinterpreted as addressing the defendant.
[(myl) Good one. The OED's etymology:
Known (as a word) only from 1678. According to the legal tradition, found in print shortly after 1700, culprit was not originally a word, but a fortuitous or ignorant running together of two words (the fusion being made possible by the abbreviated writing of legal records), viz. Anglo-Norman culpable or Latin culpabilis ‘guilty’, abbreviated cul ., and prit or prist = Old French prest ‘ready’. It is supposed that when the prisoner had pleaded ‘Not guilty’, the Clerk of the Crown replied with ‘Culpable : prest d'averrer nostre bille ,’, i.e. ‘Guilty : [and I am] ready to aver our indictment’; that this reply was noted on the roll in the form cul. prist , etc.; and that, at a later time, after the disuse of Law French, this formula was mistaken for an appellation addressed to the accused.
]
Jerry Friedman said,
December 10, 2011 @ 9:45 pm
Do combinations of nouns and articles, such as "alligator" and "algebra", count?
Andrew's example from Theocritus resembles "false division", like "an adder" from "a nadre". Or is that a whole nother thing?
andrewD said,
December 11, 2011 @ 3:28 am
So is Helpmeet an egg-green or a mondecorn?
(runs away to hide…)
Ben Zimmer said,
December 11, 2011 @ 3:46 am
andrewD: Mondeggcorn has already been suggested.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 11, 2011 @ 3:22 pm
I wonder if things like this are especially prone to happen in religious contexts because of the tendency (at least until recently) for language in religious contexts to be preserved in an archaic register than can occasionally veer into incomprehensibility for ordinary speakers. Another example having to do with Christian marriage is how the original 16th century phrase from the Church of England wedding vows "til death us depart" [spelling modernized] became semantically opaque as "depart" lost the relevant transitive meaning in English generally and was thus reanalyzed as "death us do part" with the word order ultimately switched to the more conventional "death do us part." I'm not sure if that two-step progression is best thought of as mondegreenish or eggcornish or both.
Ran Ari-Gur said,
December 11, 2011 @ 5:09 pm
At the risk of offending devoted Language Loggers, I've changed the entry to use the more standard term "folk etymology". As far as I can tell, the only time the term "eggcorn" is useful is when something is not (yet) standard — or perhaps when emphasizing that now-standard folk etymologies were once eggcorns.
Tom Recht said,
December 11, 2011 @ 8:39 pm
@Jerry Friedman, it's a somewhat nother thing: 'a nadre' -> 'an adder' is phonological reanalysis, διαστήτην 'they two stood apart' -> διὰ στήτην 'because of a stētē' is syntactic reanalysis (and a change from one word into two, at least arguably).
(Btw, the way I've heard it, the Greek reanalysis began as a misunderstanding of the rare dual form, not a deliberate joke. Hellenisteukontos blogged about it.)
Michael said,
December 12, 2011 @ 5:16 am
Looking at the Hebrew original reveals further complications: while it is possible that it means "help(er) for him", it has often been argued that the word following "help(er)" means "against him".
David Bloom said,
December 12, 2011 @ 6:32 am
Folks, woke up in great excitement with half an answer: as J.W. Brewer notes it must have a sociolinguistic component. Specifically the classification of these animals must depend on the recognition of written and spoken languages as different realms. Mondegreen and malapropism are accidents on the route from heard speech (or song) into one's own: the malapropisim when it is recognized by a third person and thence optionally rendered into writing (or originating there as fictional cases, as must be the case for at least some of the original R.B. Sheridan examples); the latter when it is recognized by the second speaker ("When I was a kid, I thought they were singing, 'Gladly the cross-eyed bear'"). The eggcorn is always from heard speech to writing. Helpmeet and the beautiful culprit are damage resulting from wrestling an expression out of writing into speech. Στήτη if it originated as an error is like helpmeet; if a joke it is a "literally literary" one, writing to writing. Then morphosyntax vs. phonology is another dimension of classification; and the larger picture will also include algebra, adder, and cases like the plural "peas" from noncount "pease".
David Bloom said,
December 12, 2011 @ 8:54 am
Also a dimension of what you might call practical prescriptivism: "peas" is good as an enrichment (a very modest one) of the language which previously had no convenient way to refer to the individual pea; the folk etymology of "helpmate" makes it an improvement over "helpmeet" because it is more perspicuous, while such cases as "eggcorn" and the once very widespread "sparrow grass" for asparagus add an element of weirdness that can only distract from communication.
Bill Walderman said,
December 14, 2011 @ 1:06 pm
"the Greek reanalysis began as a misunderstanding of the rare dual form, not a deliberate joke."
The misunderstanding was perhaps abetted by the absence of spaces between words in ancient Greek manuscripts.
Alan Shaw said,
December 21, 2011 @ 2:16 am
abetted by abutting, then