5 min
Autumn Eggcorns
Fall is the time when squirrels get busy storing acorns and other goodies for the winter. Squirrel research has shown (yes, really) that they forget where most of their acorns got buried, but all’s well that ends well because they find most of the acorns that other squirrels have similarly forgotten. This Word Stories instalment digs up the truth about another case of forgetfulness and mistaken identity: the creative linguistic mistakes known as eggcorns.
Eggcorns are born when we are not sure how to say or spell certain words, and default to different words that sound similar and seem to make sense. You may sometimes have heard Alzheimer’s disease referred to as Old-timer’s disease, for example. As we will see, the term eggcorn itself is derived from a mistaken spelling of the word… acorn!
egg (someone) on
When people talk about egging somebody on, it’s unlikely that you will find any actual eggs involved. English speakers do have an oddly solid tradition of egging people and things in the sense of pelting them with eggs (F. Marryat, Peter Simple, 1834)—and that verb does indeed derive from egg the noun.
The egg in egg somebody on, though, is a different story. That verb pronounced egg today represents a loanword from the Scandinavian language group, in which words like eggja once meant “to incite” (or sometimes “to sharpen”). As such, it is related to the modern English noun edge, not the noun egg. In Old English, ægje was borrowed as eggen, meaning “to incite” (Ormulum, ca. 1175), and although it retained its original meaning over the years, the pronunciation and spelling of egg in this sense merged over time with that of the native noun egg. For this reason, it became possible in English to egg somebody into doing something (William of Palerne, ca. 1375), to egg somebody forward (A. Barclay, The Ship of Fools, trans. S. Brant, 1509), etc.
In terms of the modern idiom, the crucial moment came when English speakers began talking in such contexts about egging somebody on (T. Drant, A Medicinable Morall, 1566). This phrasal form of the verb proved to be so successful in everyday English that every other comparable usage was eventually crowded out of the language—along with the meaning of egg as a verb in its own right apart from food fights and vandalism.
kitty-corner and variants
If you ask a local for help in finding the train station and they tell you it’s kitty-corner from city hall, they’re letting you know the two buildings face each other diagonally somehow (across an intersection, across a park, etc.). If you follow up by asking what kittens have to do with it, though, it’s unlikely that anyone will be able to help you any further. As it turns out, the kitty in kitty-corner is the accidental by-product of English experimenting with the French name for the number four.
Centuries ago in England, people who liked games of chance developed the habit of using quatre in the highly anglicized form cater to refer to a playing card with the number four, or a roll of the dice worth four (W. Horman, Vulgaria, 1519). In a remarkable example of mathematical-spatial reasoning, the verb to cater emerged soon after, meaning “to move diagonally” or “to be arranged diagonally”—apparently with reference to the way the opposing corners of a four-cornered square face each other (C. Heresbach, Foure Bookes of Husbandry, 1577). As time went on, this oblique evocation of diagonally opposed corners gave rise to the rare adverb cater meaning “diagonally” (S. Evans, Leicestershire Words, Phrases, and Proverbs, 1881) and the much more successful adjective cater-cornered meaning “diagonal” (R. Carlton, The New Purchase, 1843).
From the beginning, though, many English speakers were unclear about the cater part of cater-cornered, and preferred the form catty-cornered—which doesn’t necessarily make more sense, but at least sounds like a set of recognizable English words. In fact, the “corrupted” form catty-cornered appears in the written record even earlier than the original form cater-cornered (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, 1838), and the further feline derivative kitty-cornered seems to have followed hot on its heels (P. Nicely, The Ladies’ Repository, June 1, 1848). Not everyone was confused about cater-cornered, though, or amused by its colloquial permutations. The self-appointed language curator L. P. Meredith bemoaned “the abominable pronunciations catty and kitty cornered”, for example, in his book Everyday Errors of Speech (1872). It’s unlikely that many people today would call these derivative forms “abominable”, and in everyday practice they tend to be used interchangeably.
journeyman / journeywoman
In modern English, journeymen and journeywomen are skilled tradespeople who work for others on a job-by-job or day-by-day basis. By metaphorical extension, we sometimes use the word journeyman to refer to somebody who is competent and productive, but who is not yet a recognized master of their craft. At first glance, it may not be clear how journeys figure into the picture, since journeymen and journeywomen are not necessarily required to travel much. The key to the mystery lies in the history of the noun journey, which has not always been limited to its modern English meaning of “a trip”.
The roots of the story go all the way back to classical Latin, where dies meant “day” and the adjective diurnus therefore meant “of a day”. The latter form is the ultimate root of the English adjective diurnal (as in “of the day”—as opposed to nocturnal as in “of the night”). The word diurnus also contributed to English by generating the French noun journée (“day”) that inspired the word journal (i.e. something you publish or write in day by day). For our purposes here, though, the most important English inheritance from journée is the 14th-century adoption of the noun as journey, meaning “a day” (T. Wright and J. O. Halliwell, Reliquiæ Antiquæ, 1305) and by extension “a day’s travel” (South English Legendary, ca. 1300) or “a day’s work” (W. Langland, Piers Plowman, 1393).
Over the centuries, the usage of journey has shifted and narrowed in English. When people talk about a journey today, they mean “a voyage” (physical or metaphorical). The old meaning of “a day’s work” survives, though, in the term journeyman, which was coined to describe the kind of assistant or temporary worker one might hire by the day (Rolls of Parliament, 1463). Due to the implicit idea of a journeyman being not quite a full expert, the metaphorical use of journeyman to mean something like “amateur” or “trainee” soon followed (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 2, 1603).
The feminine variant journeywoman emerged a little later, as a way to refer to skilled female workers who might be hired by the day (H. Fielding, The Miser, 1733). The term journeywoman was never as common, though, as journeyman. In more recent years, the picture has changed yet again, as skilled labourers have gained more respect and added more women to their ranks. Women who learn a trade today are sometimes proud to have earned the right to bill themselves as journeymen in the technical sense, since as an official job title the term journeyman is associated these days with practical and profitable skills in the field of construction (The HR Gazette, March 18, 2015). That being said, many people continue to advocate for gender-neutral options like _journeyperson_ or _tradesperson_.
eggcorn
In linguistics, an eggcorn designates an unintentional substitution in someone’s personal vocabulary of a word with another, whose sound and meaning are somewhat close to those of the original term. The word eggcorn is itself an eggcorn, from a (historically attested) misrendering of acorn. Examples of other eggcorns are eyebulbs instead of eyeballs, old-timers’ disease instead of Alzheimer’s disease, biting one’s time instead of biding one’s time and all intensive purposes instead of all intents and purposes. Speech errors (accidental) and linguistic tropes (intentional) are similar to eggcorns and include:
The term eggcorn was proposed in 2003 by British-American linguist Geoffrey Pullum in response to a post by fellow linguist Mark Liberman on the blog Language Log, in which Liberman discussed the lack of a name for the phenomenon. Pullum’s rationale was “that if no suitable term already exists for cases like this [i.e. unintentionally saying ‘eggcorn’ instead of ‘acorn’], we should call them ‘egg corns’, in the metonymic tradition of ‘mondegreen’, since the eponymous solution of ‘malapropism’ and ‘spoonerism’ is not appropriate” (blog entry “Egg Corns: Folk Etymology, Malapropism, Mondegreen, ???”, Language Log, September 23, 2003). Since the coinage, etymological sources such as the Oxford English Dictionary have gone back and compiled previous occurrences of eggcorn used as an eggcorn. The following is from an April 1983 caption of Iowa’s newspaper The Hawk Eye:
Paper sacks held a variety of “recyclable” goods including ladies’ shoes, pine cones, walnuts, used toys and, according to their sign, eggcorns (acorns).
