Fritinancy

Eggcorns Over Easy? Or Just Scrambled?

Resolved: that life is short, humans are fallible, and the English language--as a minor character says in Plenty, if I'm remembering correctly--is a most demanding mistress. Therefore be it also resolved to overlook the spelling gaffes, forgive the malefactors, and, when all else fails, take a deep breath and simply turn the page. Unless someone's paying me to do otherwise.

Which is to say that I am trying to tread the path of Ultimate Serenity and accept the spelling errors I encounter every day on blog posts and (especially) in comments.

I have come to accept that some people--okay, most people--will never, ever grasp that guerrilla is spelled with two r's. (Strangely, they always remember the two l's, but they balk at doubling the r. The word means warrior; it comes from the Spanish guerra, meaning war. Two r's in warrior! Two r's in guerrilla! Now, trill 'em.)

I bestow a gracious pardon on those who have never learned that dominate is a verb, not an adjective. The adjective, for the record, is dominant. (This may be a function of pronunciation confusion--see how tolerant I am?)

I pledge that when a published article notes that "relationships are collegiate instead of hierarchical," I will mentally substitute collegial--hey, the author got most of the letters right!--and will scrub the kitchen floor instead of writing a peeved letter to the editor.

Sometimes, though, I am stymied by a strange spelling that may not be a slip of the pen (or key) but rather a genuine eggcorn--a type of misspelling based on mis-hearing. For example, eggcorn instead of acorn, justified thus: "Well, it's egg-shaped, and it's a plant like corn..." (Another term for eggcorns, especially when applied to mis-heard song lyrics, is Mondegreen.)

Here are a few recent findings that caught me between amusement and bemusement:

"Midrift bearing." Let me preface this by saying that I am devoted to reading fashion blogs, many of which are thoughtful, insightful, and elegantly written. And, no doubt, carefully edited by their authors. The commenters, though, sometimes allow their enthusiasm for the subject to override their inner spellcheckers. (I'd assumed that most people learned the difference between heel and heal in, say, fourth grade, but such is apparently not the case.) When I encountered "midrift bearing" in a comment on Une Femme d'un Certain Age, I did a double take. Even a double-double take. Midrift (for midriff) is enshrined in the Eggcorn Database; a commenter in the forum notes that it deserves consideration "on two counts: mid-rift would suggest the fleshy gap or rift between upper and lower clothed areas; mid-drift, which suggests a surplus of flesh which it may have been wiser to have left discreetly covered." And 24,800 Google hits! As for bearing instead of boring old baring, I'm speculating the author was imagining a fleshy midsection borne (no! no! not "born"!) proudly aloft like a trophy.

"Servicing the dualing needs of business & pleasure." This one comes from an excellent design blog, Brand New; it's another case of mistaken homophonic identity (dual = double, twofold; duel = combat, fight) with a hidden agenda. I suspect the author has heard "dueling needs" more often than he's seen the phrase in print, and when it came time to write about two needs frequently in opposition to each other he opted for the two sense and spelling. Dual needs. In a duel. It kind of grows on you.

"With avengence." Oh, I love this one. I spotted it in a comment to a funny/alarming Daily Mail (UK) article on age-inappropriate fashion: Carol wrote that her husband "hates [her gypsy skirts] with avengence [sic]." Here we have "a vengeance" compressed into a package that folds in the concept of to avenge (to take vengeance on behalf of). Carol may also be under the lingering influence of The Avengers. Can you believe that Diana Rigg just turned 70? I'll bet she looks fab in gypsy skirts. (Hat tip to one of the aforementioned elegantly written fashion blogs, Passage des Perles.)

New Words

It's a good-news day when the hometown paper has a headline about new dictionary words. Actually, the hundred or so words Merriam-Webster is adding to the 2008 update of its Collegiate Dictionary aren't new--just newly added. And some of them are surprisingly old.

Who knew, for example, that fanboy ("boy who is an enthusiastic devotee, such as of comics or movies") dates back to 1909? Or that wingnut ("Slang: one who advocates extreme measures or changes; radical")  first appeared in print circa 1900?

It's nice to see mondegreen ("word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung. From the mishearing in a Scottish ballad of 'laid him on the green' as 'Lady Mondegreen'") finally getting its due. Its first print appearance was in 1954; I learned the word about four decades later, through Jon Carroll's many columns devoted to the topic. Merriam-Webster is asking readers to submit their favorite mondegreens; read more here.

And yes, a mondegreen is a subgenre of eggcorn. Perhaps eggcorn will make the Collegiate's twelfth edition?

Wandering Idioms

I'm not quite sure what to call the odd locutions I've been spotting lately. They're not exactly eggcorns, which are a type of logical spelling error based on mis-hearing ("eggcorn" for "acorn," for example). What I've been seeing--and, in one instance, hearing--are eggcornized idioms, not single words. The best term I've found to describe them is malaphor, defined in Michael Erard's excellent Um ... Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean as "two idiomatic expressions blended together, as in 'that was a breath of relief.'" Other examples include "You hit the nail right on the nose," and "We'll burn that bridge when we come to it."

And then there are these examples from my own reading and listening:

Pony up to the bar.  I heard this in "Tough Room," an episode of This American Life that aired last month. In Act Two, writer Rosie Schaap tells about her teenage experience of reading Tarot cards on the Metroliner commuter train in exchange for beer. At one point she says, "I didn't dare pony up to the bar." (It's at 24:44 in the podcast.) Not "pony up at the bar": it's definitely to on the recording. Now, the standard idiom that describes what young Rosie didn't dare do is belly up to the bar, as in "crowd so close to the bar that your belly presses against it." There's even a song, "Belly Up to the Bar," in the play and movie The Unsinkable Molly Brown. (Here's a video of Debbie Reynolds and cast performing it.) Of course, pony up is also a legitimate idiom, meaning "pay up" or "fork over." Word Detective says "pony" refers to "a small amount of money," and also to anything small--specifically a "pony keg," which explains the "...to the bar" logic. The Phrase Finder, a British site, also notes that the German verb meaning to pay is poniren. In "pony up to the bar"--which, by the way, yields 12,800 Google hits--the concepts of approaching the bar and paying for drinks are conflated. It's possible that using belly as a verb strikes some people, including Rosie Schaap, as uncomfortable or improbable, and so they substitute a word that seems more logical or familiar.

MixedMaxed. Scott Schuman, the brilliant photographer of street fashion who blogs at The Sartorialist, posted a photo last month under the title "On the Street ... MixedMaxed Plaids, NYC."  This may actually be an eggcorn for mismatched, although I'm not quite sure. (One commenter, Pase Rock, wrote in confusion, "is it mixed maxed? mixed matched? or mismatched? I've been trying to figure this out since I was a child. no luck yet.") There's an auditory overlap between mismatched and the fashion lingo mix and match, as in "This season, feel free to mix and match polka dots and plaids!" or "Mix and match separates to create 10 outfits from just 4 pieces!" (Can you tell I've written a lot of fashion copy?) There's something rather charming about "mixedmaxed" when it describes clashing oversize plaids, I have to admit. But its awfully hard to say--much harder than "mismatched." By the way, Google turns up 121 hits for "mixedmaxed," 45 hits for "mixedmatched" and more than 3,000 for "mixmatched." Clearly, many people have absolutely no idea of the meaning and function of the prefix mis-, nor do they recognize it when they hear it.

Glee abandon. Duncan Riley of the influential technology blog TechCrunch is partial to this malaphor, and he seems to be responsible for its modest spread. (I found 292 G-hits, only a few of which insert a comma between glee and abandon, indicating a series of nouns.) "Sucked is not a word I usually throw around with glee abandon," Mr. Riley wrote in January, after attending the Microsoft keynote address at CES, the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. Last September he wrote about "the period of glee abandon in which companies joined Second Life." The traditional idiom is gay abandon, adopted in an innocent era when "gay" meant "cheerful." ( Memory lane digression: I remember a wonderful newspaper comic called Rick O'Shay in which the saloon owner was a sassy gal named Gaye Abandon. All the characters had punny names: the town gambler was called Deuces Wilde, the doctor was Basil Metabolism, and Rick O'Shay's kid sidekick was Quyat Burp.) I understand that we have issues with "gay" these days, but turning it into "glee" (which admittedly has a related meaning, "jubilant delight") is pretty peculiar. "Gleeful" would work just fine, but I guess the extra syllable is just too much for Riley et al.

Has anyone else spotted malaphors in the wild? Or can you think of a better term to describe these idioms-gone-weird?

Cord or Chord, Rein or Reign?

Happy belated National Dictionary Day! The day got its due in this two-minute segment on yesterday's ABC World News with Charles Gibson. There's a clever animation (TV news is trying really hard to capture viewers under age 75) that explains how variant spellings make their way into dictionaries, and there's a live-action (or taped-action) interview with linguist and lexicographer Benjamin Zimmer.

Turns out that when the Oxford University Press analyzed how "ordinary folks" spell some 2 billion English words, it found that 51 percent write "vocal cord" and 49 percent write "vocal chord." Each group has a plausible story for its choice. Similarly, 54 percent of people think of horses when they write "free rein"; 46 percent of people think of monarchs when they write "free reign." So the dictionary editors decided to be democratic: all of those spellings are now considered "acceptable," although half of them are actually eggcorns, or mishearings.

In fact, a vocal cord is a physical structure that resembles a rope. Free rein has equestrian origins. And while the stories people invent to justify the alternate spellings are colorful and amusing, they are unhelpful to those of us who make our living by slinging words.

I got into this recently with my brother David, who maintained that Scientific American erred in the first paragraph of this article when it published "poring over ... records." "Shouldn't it be pouring over?" David asked.

Poring is correct here, and even the new sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary doesn't sanction pouring to mean "examining closely or attentively." (I'd thought to pore derived from something like "looking at every pore," but it turns out the origin of the verb is unclear; it may be a variant of to peer. Here's my public apology, David!)

Still, the alternate spelling--which to me makes no sense it all; what exactly is being poured like a liquid?--is to be found everywhere nowadays. Here's a line, for example, from David Leonhardt's New York Times review of Alan Greenspan's new memoir: "He never seems happier than when pouring over economic indicators that allow him to predict everything from the 1958 steel recession to the 1990s boom." (The error appeared in the print edition; it was corrected in the online review--third paragraph from the bottom.)

Many linguists and lexicographers pride themselves on being neutral observers--descriptivists rather than prescriptivists. As linguist Michael Covarrubias noted yesterday in a comment about vocal c-h-o-r-d, "What makes it acceptable? Well ... the fact that it's accepted. Sometimes linguistics is just that simple."

But teaching, writing, editing, and proofreading are not "that simple." Those of us who ply those trades can't afford to be descriptivists. We need guidelines. And if we can't find them in respected dictionaries, where shall we turn? If we're editing Warren Buffett, for example, and he writes "vocal chords" in one of his annual reports (as he once did; I wrote him a letter about it), do we let it slide or pick up the blue pencil?

Do Benjamin Zimmer and Michael Covarrubias write vocal chords and free reign?

What would you do?

Eggcorns in Ecstacy

The Volokh Conspiracy is a legal blog (or blawg), but many of its posts are devoted to language. Last week blog co-author Eugene Volokh stirred things up when he published a post about "commonly misspelled phrases"--like "free reign" instead of "free rein" and "baited breath" instead of "bated breath." ("Bated" here is a truncation of "abated," meaning "shortened.")

Then he invited his readers to contribute their own examples, along with Google hits for correct and incorrect versions. And, oh lordy, they responded. And vented. And twisted their handkerchiefs in despair. The last time I checked, there were 195 comments. One commenter noted that these malapropisms aren't misspellings--"baited" and "reign" are spelled correctly--but rather eggcorns: substitutions of words based on the mis-hearing or misunderstanding of an idiom. ("Eggcorn" itself comes from a mis-hearing of "acorn.")

A few of the choicer submissions:

• "Exercise in fertility" for "exercise in futility" (probably an eggcorn)
• "Pre-Madonna" for "prima donna" (a true eggcorn, and well worth preserving IMO; it's also cited in Um...Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, the new book by Michael Erard, which I've just started reading)
• "Wallah" for "voilà" (a misspelling, unless you mean this)
• "Penultimate" for "really, really super important" (a misunderstanding of what the pen- prefix means)

My favorite comment came from Stevethepatentguy (sorry, Volokh Conspiracy doesn't number its comments), who chided some of the more agitated commenters by punning, "Watch those ad homonym attacks."

While you're over at Volokh Conspiracy, check out this follow-up post and also this one, in which Volokh challenges the declaration that an ungainly neologism like mentee (the person a mentor, uh, ments) "is not a word." And then read what dictionary editor Erin McKean has to say over at Dictionary Evangelist.

(Hat tip to Mark Liberman, posting at Language Log.)

False Friends IV: A Bewilderment of Words

This is the fourth in a series of posts on word pairs that frequently get confused, abused, or misused in written and spoken English. Thanks to everyone who has sent in False Friends suggestions; if you don't see your contributions here, look for them in a future installment.

• Ambiguous/Ambivalent: The two words share the Latin prefix that means "both," but they are used to describe different states. Ambiguous applies to situations; it  means "unclear" or "undefined." Ambivalent is used with people; it describes the condition of being torn between two (and generally only two) opposing views. Here's a somewhat contrived example to illustrate the distinction: "Our policy on recycling is ambiguous, and the CEO says she's ambivalent about whether or not to clarify it."
• Perspective/Prospective: Perspective is a noun that originally meant "the science of optics"--a useful mnemonic, because perspective relates to vision. A perspective may be an outlook, a point of view, or the ability to perceive things in context ("Let's try to keep our perspective during this transition"). Prospective is an adjective that refers to the future, or one's prospects: You pitch an ad campaign to prospective clients, or send fundraising letters to prospective donors.
• Nonplussed/Nonchalant. These words are non-synonyms, but nonplussed--which means "bewildered" or "unable to go further" (non + plus = no more)--is frequently misused to mean unperturbed or unfazed or even calm. Those latter meanings are properly attached to nonchalant, from French words meaning "not heated"--that is, cool. Chalant is related etymologically to calorie, and that's your mnemonic. No-calorie emotion is nonchalance. When your mind is boggled--plus!--you're nonplussed.
• Oral/Verbal. When I hear "Could you deliver that verbally?" I'm always a bit, well, nonplussed--especially when I learn that the questioner wants me to speak, not write. Oral means "spoken by mouth" (its origin is Latin os or or-, meaning mouth; think of an oral themometer). Verbal means simply "in words." (In grammar lingo, it means "with verbs," as in "a verbal suffix.") The confusion stems from the fact that verbal has indeed been used over the centuries to mean spoken. When there's a possibility of ambiguity (not, I hasten to add, ambivalence), use oral to mean spoken and verbal to mean more generally "associated with words," as in "a verbal distinction" (not associated with content or ideas) or "a verbal confrontation" (without fisticuffs or weapons).
• Hark/Hearken: Hark and hearken are nearly synonymous (both come from Middle English harken) but are used differently. Hark back means "to return to a previous place in a narrative": "Her use of blog entries harks back to older forms of the epistolary novel." Hark!--used as an imperative verb--is a quaint way to say "Listen!" And so is hearken, although not as an imperative. (I learned the difference between hark and hearken by associating the "e" in hearken with ear.) Hearken back is incorrect, and harken (in an email from Springwise: "At Grom, gelato flavours based on seasonality harken back to times when storing perishable ingredients wasn't feasible") is a non-word.
• Comprise/Compose. Let's make this simple: Avoid saying or writing "comprised of" and you'll be fine. Comprise is closely related to comprehend in the sense of include. Here's your mantra: The whole comprises the parts. A team comprises its members--it isn't "comprised of" them. It's also OK to say "A team is composed of its members." For a whole lot more on this subject, from a bona fide linguist, see Michael Covarrubias's post on his blog, Wishydig. 

Read False Friends the First.

Read False Friends the Second.

Read False Friends the Third.

And for a comprehensive survey of frequently confused word pairs, as well as some eggcorns such as "calm, cool, and collective," see Paul Brian's Common Errors in English Usage.

July Linkfest

A true miscellany this month:

This may be the best television commercial ever created. I watched it four times in a row. (Hat tip to JRC.)

Linguist and Oxford University Press editor Ben Zimmer, an occasional contributor to Language Log, is writing a new blog under the OUP rubric: From A to Zimmer. In his first three posts he wrote engagingly about how dictionary editors judge neologisms such as "thirdhand smoke"; how misspellings such as "miniscule" for "minuscule" (remember: it's minus, not mini) become accepted; and how eggcorning shifts the meanings of idioms. (If you have trouble with rein and reign, you'll want to read this post right now.)

Seth Godin on Apple's sloppy strategy in naming the iPhone: "Now that Apple had two successful 'i' products in a row, they got giddy and tried to own one of the 26 letters of the alphabet. Which you can't do. So iHome isn't made by Apple, but iLife is. The more equity Apple puts into the i, the more they waste, because others can just leverage it for free and people get confused." (Read my own take on the subject, from last January.)

Text-messaging abbreviations en español, courtesy of Oxford University Press (which also offers guidance for writing an old-fashioned letter in Spanish). LOL (laughing out loud) translates to MDR (muerto de risa = dead from laughter). Hat tip to Language and Humor Blog.

Good limericks are harder to write than you'd imagine. That's why I'm so impressed by the anonymous blogger Limerick Savant ("Dedicated to no-nonsense nonsense"), who transforms recent headlines into perfectly metered five-line masterpieces, like this one about the recent uproar over Whole Foods CEO/sock-puppet blog commenter John Mackey:

It remains to be seen, Savant notes,
The effect that it had on stock quotes;
But it's certainly tacky,
The way that John Mackey
Has chosen to so-so Wild Oats.

Speaking of lunch and things mack-y: It's Mickey D's up here, but Down Under they call McDonald's "Mackers." Or is it "Maccas"?

Benjamin Franklin, Editor

Today's Writer's Almanac, heard on public radio stations, considers the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, whose adoption in 1776 we celebrate today:

Jefferson finished the first draft after a few days' work and sent it to Benjamin Franklin on the morning of June 21, asking for suggestions. Franklin made just a few changes. In the most famous passage, Jefferson had written, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable." Franklin changed it to, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

The Continental Congress made a lot more changes to Jefferson's draft when they considered its adoption. They deleted passages that attacked the British people, rather than just the king, and they cut an entire paragraph in which Jefferson had attacked the king for perpetuating the slave trade. The last five paragraphs were considered too long and rambling, and so they were reduced by half. In total, they made 86 changes, eliminating 480 words and leaving 1,337. Jefferson found the process of revision extremely painful. He later said, "I was sitting by Dr. Franklin, who perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations."

Franklin, of course, had been a newspaper editor and publisher at the beginning of his long career. That may have been where he learned the journalist's credo: Omit needless words.

But think of how much grief the new nation might have been spared if Franklin had reconsidered and written stet on that paragraph about the slave trade.

P.S. For a parsing of the language of the Bill of Rights, including the non-parallel construction of the Sixth Amendment (on the right to a speedy trial) and the "do process" constitutional eggcorn, read Benjamin Zimmer's post today in Language Log.

Muddled

This was the headline on the Letters page of yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle:

Is Pelosi's trip muddling the waters?

Did you do a double-take? I did. Although muddle and muddy are related, the correct idiom is muddy the waters, meaning "confuse the issue." First recorded usage was in 1837.

You can "muddle through" a situation or feel "muddled" because of fatigue. You can even "muddle" a cocktail (by stirring it gently). But although one definition of muddle is "to make turbid or muddy," the expression muddle the waters is incorrect, the possible result of muddled hearing. More than 300 Google hits for muddle the waters--compared with 21,600 hits for the correct saying--lead one to suspect that the incorrect expression is a recently hatched eggcorn.

The Books I Can't Forget

Here it is, twelve days into October, and I still don't have my National Book Month decorations up. No matter. I'm inviting all of you to celebrate with me by sharing the titles of two books--more if you can't help yourself--that have taken up permanent residence in your brain and changed the way you think about people, ideas, life, or the world. Small stuff like that.

I got the idea from Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users (an excellent blog, but, disappointingly, not about orgies in opium dens). A few days ago Kathy asked her readers to recommend one fiction and one nonfiction book "that you wish more people would read" and to add a sentence or two explaining why. So far, she's gotten 121 responses. Obviously, this is a subject people are--hate to say it--passionate about.

One of my own favorites is Kathy's nonfiction runner-up: the late Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, republished last year in a 20th-anniversary edition. Long before the Internet and reality TV, Postman saw the ways in which the media, and especially television, degrade public discourse by lulling us into satisfied stupefaction. It's an angry book and an exceptionally well written one; I re-read it every so often to whet my indignation.

But Kathy got there first, so here are my all-new, all-original picks:

Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, by Lawrence Weschler. Few people can write about art without sounded like pompous jerks; The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl is one exception; Robert Hughes is a second; my friend Carol Kino is a third. Lawrence Weschler (who also writes for The New Yorker) is perhaps the most adventurous and accessible of them all. Weschler is an unabashed enthusiast who makes mind-reeling connections between things you'd never think were related: the Bosnian war crimes tribunal and the paintings of Vermeer; a photograph of Monica Lewinsky and the Mona Lisa; a 1969 Rothko painting and an image from the first moonwalk. Read any of the 30 short (and gorgeously illustrated) essays in this book and be excited, energized, and enlightened.

Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban. Speculative, post-apocalyptic fiction generally leaves me cold, but Riddley Walker is sui generis. It's set in the nuclear winter of some future England, where humans and dogs are enemies. Twelve-year-old Riddley, newly orphaned, undertakes a coming-of-age quest in which Punch and Judy puppet shows--one of the most ancient of Anglo-Saxon theatrical traditions--figure prominently. But it's the language, not the plot, that sets this novel apart. In Hoban's vision, and Riddley's first-person narrative, the English language has become as deconstructed as society itself; England is "Inland," America is "Eusa," and the Archbishop of Canterbury (whose office has somehow survived) is "the Ardship of Cambry." Punctuation? Fuhgeddaboudit. Working your way through text like "On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs..." isn't easy, I'll grant you. Riddley Walker demanded more focused attention than anything I'd ever read. But the rewards go on and on. Check out Graphesthesia, a terrific annotation site, and this Language Log entry about Riddley Walker and eggcorns.

Over to you now. No need to be as prolix as I've been, but don't feel constrained, either. Join the conversation by clicking the Comments tab directly below.