Search Results for: Egg corn

I am absolutely delighted to learn that Geoff Pullum’s coinage eggcorn (which I wrote about back in 2004) has made it to the official word-hoard of the English language. There is now a draft entry (Sept. 2010) for eggcorn, n., 1. = ACORN n., 2. An alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements as a similar-sounding word. In allusion to sense 1, which is an example of such an alteration. Here are the citations:

2003 M. LIBERMAN Egg Corns: Folk Etymol., Malapropism, Mondegreen? (Update) in languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu (Weblog) 30 Sept. (O.E.D. Archive), Geoff Pullum suggests that if no suitable term already exists for cases like this, we should call them ‘egg corns’, in the metonymic tradition of ‘mondegreen’. 2004 Boston Globe (Nexis) 12 Dec. K5 Shakespeare’s Hamlet said he was ‘to the manner born’, but the eggcorn ‘to the manor born’ has wide currency. 2006 New Scientist 26 Aug. 52/2 Eggcorns often involve replacing an unfamiliar or archaic word with a more common one, such as ‘old-timer’s’ disease for Alzheimer’s. 2010 K. DENHAM & A. LOBECK Linguistics for Everyone i. 13 Crucially, eggcorns make sense, often more than the original words.

I got the good news from Ben Zimmer’s post at the Log.

I was looking through my ancient (corrected edition 1961, Third Printing) copy of Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol when my eye hit upon something that must have puzzled me when I first read the book in college, but of course pretty much everything puzzled me then (ah, youth!), so I moved on and forgot it. Now I thought “I’ll bet the internet will solve this for me,” and sure enough it did. From Alex Beam’s The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship:

The final chapter, 6, re-creates an exchange between the author and his publisher, Laughlin, “in Utah, sitting in the lounge of an Alpine hotel.” Laughlin is badgering Nabokov to tell the reader what Gogol’s books are about: “I have gone through it carefully, and so has my wife, and we have not found the plots.” Nabokov tells the reader that he tacked on a seven-page chronology, with plot summaries, to placate Laughlin. Clearly he thought Laughlin wouldn’t read the addendum, because he inserted this random sentence into the recitation of Gogol’s life: “Browning’s door is preserved in the library of Wellesley College.” [It is.] The Robert Browning “Easter egg”—computer lingo for a hidden joke—survived the 1959 and 1961 reeditions of Nikolai Gogol, but later vanished from the text.

And an excellent joke it is, though hard on the poor puzzled student. (The diligent ctrl-F’er will find it used in sly homage on this критика page.)

Addendum (Mar. 2024). I was remiss in that final reference to “this критика page” in not noting the author, something I always try to do; the linked piece is Peter Lubin’s “Kickshaws and Motley” (first in the Northwestern TRIQUARTERLY Nabokov issue #17 [Winter 1970], pp. 187-209), of which Nabokov wrote (in his introduction to that issue):

The multicolored inklings offered by Mr. Lubin in his “Kickshaws and Motley” are absolutely dazzling. Such things as his “v ugloo” [Russ. for “in the corner”] in the igloo of the globe [a blend of “glow” and “strobe”] are better than anything I have done in that line. Very beautifully he tracks down to their lairs in Eliot three terms queried by a poor little person in Pale Fire. I greatly admire the definition of tmesis (Type I) as a “semantic petticoat slipped on between the naked noun and its clothing epithet,” as well as Lubin’s “proleptic” tmesis illustrated by Shakespeare’s glow-worm beginning “to pale his ineffectual fire.” And the parody of an interview with N. (though a little more exquisitely iridized than my own replies would have been) is sufficiently convincing to catch readers.

Now, that must have been a satisfying encomium. You can read more about Lubin here.

Last year Mark Liberman had a Language Log entry discussing the case of a woman who wrote “egg corns” for acorns. It turns out that this is fairly widespread, probably the product of a dialect in which egg is pronounced “aig.” Since then the eggcorn has become something of a mascot at Language Log; today Mark discusses it further, giving the example “hand few” used for handful and quoting Geoff Pullum to the effect that “eggcorns are tiny little poems, a symptom of human intelligence and creativity,” and ends with an Update mentioning a fact I should have recalled myself: the word acorn itself contains an earlier misunderstanding. As the OED says:

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A new language blog has hit the shores of Blogovia, to wit Language Log, written by four actual linguists, Geoff Pullum, Steven Bird, Mark Liberman, and Chris Potts. The latest post (Posted by myl at September 23, 2003 12:33 PM) is on a woman who wrote “egg corns” for “acorns”; I’d give a permalink, but the site doesn’t provide them: wake up, guys! (Via UJG, who doesn’t actually link to the site: wake up, jim!)

The Random Link feature took me to this 2013 post focused on James Harbeck’s word blog Sesquiotica, and (as is my wont) I clicked through to see if the blog was still there. Against all expectations, not only was it there but it was still going strong, and the latest post was so interesting I thought I’d bring it here:

For brunch on Sunday, I made ramekins.

Can I say that? Is ramekin like casserole or paella, a dish (recipe) that has gotten its name from the dish (vessel) that the dish is dished from?

The answers to those questions are (a) yes and (b) no. Ramekin has not transferred the name of the container to the name of the foodstuff. In fact, it’s the reverse: the little round ceramic vessels (like cute little food parentheses) are named after a foodstuff that is made using them.

I should say, first, to be fair, that what I made is more typically called shirred eggs. But there are many ways to make shirred eggs, and the recipe I made also fits the definition of the culinary item called ramekin, which is, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, “A type of savoury dish based on cheese, mixed with butter, eggs, and seasonings, and usually baked and served in a small mould or dish.” The word has been used in that sense in English since the mid-1600s – borrowed over from French – while the metonymic transference to the ceramic vessel happened only by the later 1800s (Funk’s 1895 Standard Dictionary of the English Language defined that kind of ramekin as “a dish in which ramekins are baked”).

Did you wonder, when I said “borrowed over from French,” why it’s not ramequin? In fact, at the time we borrowed it, it was. So why did we change it? Well… we changed it back. You see, French didn’t invent the word; it traces back to regional Dutch rammeken and Low German ramken. It’s like mannequin, which came from the Dutch manneken – meaning ‘little man’. The -(e)ken suffix is a diminutive.

So the next question must be “Little ram?” Heh. That has produced some perplexity; the OED (and Wikipedia, citing it) scratches its head and says that it seems to come from ram ‘battering ram’, “although the semantic motivation is unclear.” Meanwhile, Wiktionary notes that Rahm is a German word for ‘cream’, cognate with Dutch room (‘whipped cream’ is slagroom, but I’ll have it anyway) and the now-disused English word ream (displaced by cream, which is, go figure, unrelated). That seems a bit more semantically motivating, for what it’s worth.

Fascinating stuff, none of which I knew (except the name of the container, which — if you’re unfamiliar with it — is trisyllabic: /ˈræməkən/). Harbeck goes on to provide his recipe for shirred eggs, in case you’re interested; I’ll finish up with some OED citations and their head-scratching etymology (the entry was revised in 2008):
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Jordan Salama writes for the New Yorker (archived) about Andean immigrants in New York and how they keep in touch with the folks back home; here are some especially Hattic bits:

Doña Elvira, who lives eleven thousand feet above sea level in Ecuador, wakes up before dawn. These days, the first thing she does is check her phone. […] Elvira, a forty-nine-year-old mother of eight and grandmother of five, didn’t use social media before María and another daughter, Mercedes, left home. She didn’t even have a smartphone until the pandemic, when Ecuador switched to virtual schooling, bringing widespread Internet service to her impoverished area, in the mountainous center of the country. She doesn’t post comments on TikTok; she hardly knows how to write. Nor does she read or speak much Spanish—her native tongue is Kichwa, an Indigenous language spoken widely in the upper Andes. Nonetheless, whenever one of her daughters posts a video, Elvira watches it over and over. […]

At first glance, the videos are fairly unremarkable. They often feature shaky, low-quality camerawork and use kitschy stock effects that give the people in the clips glittering faces or puffed-up lips. But overlaid on the group choreography and the street scenes are grainy, scrapbook-style photographs of relatives still back home in Ecuador, to whom the videos are dedicated. The captions and onscreen text are messages to loved ones, often in poorly written Spanish: “Me duele estar lejos mi kerida familia. . . . Dios me los vendida” (“It pains me to be far away, my dear family. . . . May God bless you”), “Tu y yo por100pre juntos los 3 luchemos por nuestro sueños” (“You and I together forever, the three of us, let’s fight for our dreams”). The clips almost never use camera sound. Instead, they are set to chicha music, a popular genre of cumbia that combines traditional Andean sounds with techno-psychedelic instrumentals, and is known for lyrics about heartbreak and migration. Many previously unknown chicha artists have become famous in recent years because songs of theirs have gone viral on TikTok. Some artists—such as Ángel Guaraca, who sings the hit “El Migrante” and calls himself the Indio Cantor de América—have even embarked on U.S. tours, stopping in places with large Ecuadorian communities, such as Queens and Brooklyn; Fall River, Massachusetts; and Danbury, Connecticut.

The most popular videos have hundreds of thousands of views. It is clear that users are emulating one another, particularly given that certain errors are repeated so often that they become trendy. The emoji of the red-white-and-blue Liberian flag is regularly used instead of the American one, and places in the New York area are spelled as they would be pronounced by Spanish-speaking migrants. (Junction Boulevard in Queens is called “La Jonson”; Roosevelt Avenue is “La Rusbel.”) […]

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Amir Ahmadi Arian writes for the Yale Review about another of those amazing people whose stories I have to share with the multitudes; he starts off with an Iranian series called Women’s Secret Network that briefly shows a translator named Zabihollah Mansouri:

He appears suddenly, talks about something he calls his “philosophy of expansionism” in translation, has an awkward interaction with another character, and then vanishes, never to be seen again. The screenwriters didn’t bother to provide an introduction for him because they knew it wasn’t necessary. Most people in Iran, even those who rarely crack open a book, know who Mansouri is, though he died almost forty years ago.

That’s what I call a hook. He goes on to tell about how he first encountered Mansouri as a child growing up in Ahvaz:

No one in my family or our neighborhood was into books, and there was no internet then. So when I looked at the shelves in the library, I had no idea what any of the books were about and knew nothing of the writers who had written them. I had no sense of good or bad literature, good or bad writing, accurate or inaccurate translation. In this total absence of guidance from the outside world, I took a quantitative approach to measuring the significance of writers: the more frequently a name appeared on the shelves, the more important the author must be. One day, I set out to survey the entire library. The result was undeniable: the most important literary figure in Iran was a translator by the name of Zabihollah Mansouri. Our little library carried far more of his titles than any other writer’s.

Having thus grabbed our attention, he gives a brief history of the “great translation movement in Iran” and says “Translators soon became a pillar of Iranian culture and have remained so ever since. And in his day, no translator was more important, or more prolific, than Mansouri.”
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I first featured Justin B Rye at LH in 2005 (his Primer In SF Xenolinguistics); now, thanks to a comment by January First-of-May, I learn that he’s got a post called Fantastic Statistics in which he analyzes his extensive sf collection:

In the twenty‐first century I decided I didn’t want a paper collection anyway – what I want is a story collection. If I switched to ebooks then apart from a few sentimental‐value volumes of Teach Yourself Sumerian and the like the physical copies could go to the charity shop on the corner. This proved a fortunate idea given the number of times I’ve needed to move house recently, but electronic texts have other advantages too […]. For a start, I always convert my ebooks into a consistent HTML format so they’ll work in any browser (including my throwback of a mobile phone); but the part that got me writing this page is that once I’ve done that I can also carry out all sorts of basic text analysis from the command‐line. And thanks to all the old magazines that are out of copyright, it’s getting easier and easier to end up with a moderately comprehensive collection of the big‐name SF award‐winners of the twentieth century (and even quite a few of the ones I might actually want to re‐read). So here are some interesting facts, or at any rate facts, about my virtual bookshelf.

There are all sorts of tidbits, like Most‐Used Title (“the title that shows up most often is The End”), Famous Titles First Published Together (“the all‐time best value for money still has to be Dangerous Visions” — I still haven’t gotten over my copy, signed by many of the authors, getting lost in the mail years ago), Title Length (shortest is We, longest is the Connie Willis short story “‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective”), word frequencies, and the like. I will single out for special mention the section I was gladdest to see there, The Bechdel Test:
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Thatching Info.com is one of those delightful sites that assembles masses of detail about some subject unknown to most people today:

The information available here, is the result of over three decades of practical experience, plus more than a dozen years of research; into the history and various working methods, employed in the craft of thatching. The research included an eighteen thousand mile trip around most of Britain. Thus this site covers thatching throughout the Island of Britain and the islands around it, from Shetland to Sark, with a few excursions to other lands…

Of course what caught my attention was this, in the following paragraph: “there is a large glossary to help you.” And so there is, A Glossary of Thatching Names and Terms:

As well as a list of the technical terms and names, used throughout this site; I have also included other names, which are not mentioned in the text. Hopefully allowing this glossary to also act as a basic reference, to the myriad nomenclature found in the craft. Also included are terms from the dialects and languages, of the Channel Islands, Cornwall, Wales and Scotland…. […] Alternative names are in brackets. Other glossary entries are in italics. (I have not cross referenced all the various names, for a Thatching Spar, due to the many terms, used to describe this humble article….

The main list runs from A Frame (Principal Rafter) “The largest timbers, in a normal roof construction” to Yoke (Jack or Groom) “A forked stick, used to carry a Burden of Yealms on to a roof,” including such savory terms as Biddle (either “A wooden frame, with pair of spikes set in the top” or “Yet another name for a Legget or Bat”), Flaughter Spade (“A form of breast plough”), Tekk (“The name, used in Shetland, for Oat Straw”), and Witch’s seat (“a large flat stone set in a chimney”); then there follow lists of terms from the Channel Islands (“Gllic: Thatch”), Cornwall (“Teyz: Thatch also a Roof, suggesting they were one and the same for a long time”), Wales (“Gwrachod: A tied underlayer of thatch”), and Scotland (“Fraoch: Heather or Ling”).

Finally a couple of Gaelic proverbs…

Is tr’om sn’ithe air tigh gun tughadh… Rain drops come heavy, on a house unthatched.

Tigh a tughadh gun a sh’iomaineachadh… Thatching a house without roping it. (Is to surely labour in vain!)

And of course there are plenty of informative images.

Recently I’ve run across a couple of omissions from the OED that mildly surprised me; they’re not common usages, but they’re established enough you’d think the grand repository of the English wordhoard, which embraces even absurd hapaxes like pancakewards (1867 Cornhill Mag. Mar. 362 Her allowance would not admit of..a surreptitious egg, might her desire pancakewards be never so strong), would have entries for them:

1) Entry fine. I encountered this as the definition for a prerevolutionary French term, which I forgetlods et ventes [thanks, Xerîb!]; it means “a payment due when a new customary tenant entered land” and is frequently used in books dealing with relevant topics (“to all transfers of land was the imposition of the entry fine”; “Both of these variants confirm the principle that the entry fine was the responsibility of the incoming tenant”; “the 24,000 marks possibly paid as a relief or entry fine to Philip II of France for Richard’s French lands”; etc. etc.). The OED, s.v. entry, has “2. Law. The action or an act of taking up occupation of a piece of land, property, etc., as a legal assertion of ownership; the action or right of entering upon possession of land, property, etc.,” and the phrase writ of entry “a writ for the recovery of land or property from one claiming legal possession of it,” but not entry fine (and the word fine does not occur in the entry for entry).

2) Turquet/torquetum. This one has its own Wikipedia entry (with splendid illustrations):

The torquetum or turquet is a medieval astronomical instrument designed to take and convert measurements made in three sets of coordinates: Horizon, equatorial, and ecliptic. It is said to be a combination of Ptolemy’s astrolabon and the plane astrolabe.

There’s a detailed description in The History of the Telescope, by Henry C. King (p. 10):

Nasir ed-din el-Tusi is believed to have introduced the turquet or torquetum (Fig. 5), an instrument that became very popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was a kind of portable equatorial and altazimuth. To a base plate was hinged an inclinable plate which could be set in the plane of the celestial equator by adjusting the length of a graduated arm or stylus. At right angles to the inclinable plate was a polar axis carrying two circles. A movable alidade indicated declinations on the upper circle, while the equatorial circle, in the plane of the inclinable plate, indicated right ascensions. […] In any case, the torquetum appears to have been in regular use in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Torquetum occurs nowhere in the OED; turquet, amusingly, does… in two hapaxes with very different senses:

turquet, n.¹
Obsolete. rare^—1
A player dressed up to resemble a Turk.
1625 F. Bacon Ess. (new ed.) 225 Anti-masques..haue been commonly of Fooles, Satyres, Baboones, Wilde-Men, Antiques, Beasts, Sprites, Witches, Ethiopes, Pigmies, Turquets,..and the like.

turquet, n.²
Obsolete. rare^—1
? Spelt. […]
1725 R. Bradley Chomel’s Dictionaire Œconomique at Stone A Remedy for the Stone and Gravel is, to take the Herb Turquet or Storch-Corn [sic], dry it and reduce it to Powder.

I trust the good folks at Oxford will take note and do the right thing.