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 indefatigable Trevor Joyce sent me Steven Morris’s Guardian story about laudable lexicography:

It is not likely to be a hefty volume because the vast majority of the material has been lost in the mists of time. But the remnants of a language spoken in parts of the UK and Ireland 2,000 years ago are being collected for what is being billed as the first complete dictionary of ancient Celtic. The dictionary will not be huge because relatively few words survive, but experts from Aberystwyth University say they expect they will end up with more than 1,000 words.

Sources for the dictionary will range from Julius Caesar’s account of his conquest of parts of northern Europe to ancient memorial stones. It will include words from about 325BC up to AD500. Dr Simon Rodway, a senior lecturer in the department of Welsh and Celtic studies at Aberystwyth, said it was exciting to be involved in compiling the first dictionary of its kind.

He said: “These disparate sources have never before been brought together in a way that offers such an insight into the nature of Celtic languages spoken in these islands at the dawn of the historical period. The picture of the linguistic landscape of Britain and Ireland will be of interest not only to linguists but to historians, archaeologists and archaeogeneticists.” […]

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Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones was one of my birthday presents this year, and I just got through reading it. If you want the plot laid out, you can read the Wikipedia entry or Parul Sehgal’s NY Times review (archived). Me, I don’t read books for plot, and all I can tell you is that the novel’s architecture and its prose are perfectly fitted to the story being told; I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs, and if you like them you will certainly like the novel:

My mama’s mother, Mother Lizbeth, and her daddy, Papa Joseph, originally owned all this land: around fifteen acres in all. It was Papa Joseph nicknamed it all the Pit, Papa Joseph who let the white men he work with dig for clay that they used to lay the foundation for houses, let them excavate the side of a hill in a clearing near the back of the property where he used to plant corn for feed. Papa Joseph let them take all the dirt they wanted until their digging had created a cliff over a dry lake in the backyard, and the small stream that had run around and down the hill had diverted and pooled into the dry lake, making it into a pond, and then Papa Joseph thought the earth would give under the water, that the pond would spread and gobble up the property and make it a swamp, so he stopped selling earth for money. He died soon after from mouth cancer, or at least that’s what Mother Lizbeth used to tell us when we were little. She always talked to us like grown-ups, cussed us like grown-ups. She died in her sleep after praying the rosary, when she was in her seventies, and two years later, Mama, the only baby still living out of the eight that Mother Lizbeth had borne, died when having Junior. Since it’s just us and Daddy here now with China, the chickens, and a pig when Daddy can afford one, the fields Papa Joseph used to plant around the Pit are overgrown with shrubs, with saw palmetto, with pine trees reaching up like the bristles on a brush.

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Mama taught me how to find eggs; I followed her around the yard. It was never clean. Even when she was alive, it was full of empty cars with their hoods open, the engines stripped, and the bodies sitting there like picked-over animal bones. We only had around ten hens then. Now we have around twenty-five or thirty because we can’t find all the eggs; the hens hide them well. I can’t remember exactly how I followed Mama because her skin was dark as the reaching oak trees, and she never wore bright colors: no fingernail pink, no forsythia blue, no banana yellow. Maybe she bought her shirts and pants bright and they faded with wear so that it seemed she always wore olive and black and nut brown, so that when she bent to pry an egg from a hidden nest, I could hardly see her, and she moved and it looked like the woods moved, like a wind was running past the trees. So I followed behind her by touch, not by sight, my hand tugging at her pants, her skirt, and that’s how we walked in the room made by the oaks, looking for eggs. I like looking for eggs. I can wander off by myself, move as slow as I want, stare at nothing. Ignore Daddy and Junior. Feel like the quiet and the wind. I imagine Mama walking in front of me, turning to smile or whistle at me to get me to walk faster, her teeth white in the gloom. But still, it is work, and I have to pull myself back and concentrate to find anything to eat.

The young narrator, Esch, is a reader, and she is currently absorbed in Greek myth, the Medea story in particular; it is used not for precious parallels but for salutary jolts. And one linguistic point: when I came to a mention of Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, of course I wanted to know how “Buras” was pronounced (anyone who presumes anything about Louisiana place names is a fool — case in point, Natchitoches (/ˈnækətəʃ/). Since the Wikipedia article didn’t tell me, I had to trawl through a number of videos to be sure that the locals say /ˈbjurəs/ (BYOO-rəs), and since I can’t find that corroborated in a printed source that will satisfy the Korinthenkacker at Wikipedia and thus can’t add it to the article, I’m sharing it here. (I did find a video of a woman teaching viewers how to pronounce some of the more opaque Louisiana place names by first parading the wrong versions, often more than once, before triumphantly producing the correct one. Apparently she has no idea that what that does is hammer the wrong forms into your head; when she says “I hear people say X, X, X, X, X, when actually it’s Y!” you’re not going to come away with anything but X. Bah.)

Callie Holtermann writes for the NY Times (archived) about a linguist who posts online as Etymology Nerd and who was mentioned here last year:

Adam Aleksic has been thinking about seggs. Not sex, but seggs — a substitute term that took off a few years ago among those trying to dodge content-moderation restrictions on TikTok. Influencers shared stories from their “seggs lives” and spoke about the importance of “seggs education.”

Lots of similarly inventive workarounds have emerged to discuss sensitive or suggestive topics online. This phenomenon is called algospeak, and it has yielded terms like “cornucopia” for homophobia and “unalive,” a euphemism for suicide that has made its way into middle schoolers’ offline vocabulary.

These words roll off the tongue for Mr. Aleksic, a 24-year-old linguist and content creator who posts as Etymology Nerd on social media. Others may find them slightly bewildering. But, as he argues in a new book, “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language,” these distinctly 21st-century coinages are worthy of consideration by anyone interested in the forces that mold our shifting lexicon.
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Mr. Aleksic has been dissecting slang associated with Gen Z on social media since 2023. In wobbly, breathless videos that are usually about a minute long, he uses his undergraduate degree in linguistics from Harvard to explain the spread of terms including “lowkey” and “gyat.” (If you must know, the latter is a synonym for butt.)

There’s much more at the link, including a discussion of “rizz” (which we talked about in 2023); I was curious about the odd-looking “gyat” and googled, but I’m not convinced by the etymology given here: “Girl Your Ass Is Thick.”

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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