The Eggcorn Challenge

[lillibet]

As many of you know, I love eggcorns, those wacky re-shapings of familiar words or phrases, often undetectable by spell-checkers. A post tonight on Language Log includes a beautiful (albeit deliberate) one: feint-hearted. For me, the best thing about eggcorns is finding a way in which they actually make sense. Give it a try! Look up three eggcorns in The Eggcorn Database and tell us what the resulting phrase might really mean.

a posable thumb - what every recruiter of hand models looks for, a thumb able to be beautifully positioned and held by its possessor

veil of tears - the blurred vision of a tearful eye

feint-hearted - indicating repeatedly that one is ready for a relationship and then pulling away when presented with a genuine opportunity

Comments

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I've certainly seen "veil of tears" a lot, but never actually used in the context that one would want "vale of tears". For example, Lifting the Veil of Tears about repression of women in Islam, or Soul Asylum's song - "I heard the eyes that look to a better world always hide beneath the veil of tears."

I don't know if it ought to count as an eggcorn if it has a clear and distinct meaning from the one it is a homonym for; eggcorns are all about hearing something and re-deriving the wrong words in context...

But, the examples given on the eggcorn page are all about departing this veil of tears, so they do count, and they elsewhere include examples like "Sarah Palin and her elk are ruining the Republicans", when I would have called that just a mis-spelling, so I seem to be more conservative in my eggcornification. :)

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

That's the thing about eggcorns--they're not "wrong" they're re-shapings of standard phrases that do (or can) make sense in context. "Veil of tears" in the context of Islam is brilliant, but it's not clear to me that it's not a deliberate eggcorn making a play on words, rather than someone thinking that's the standard spelling. When it's done out of ignorance or carelessness, I think that's unfortunate--I've never seen "pouring over a book" used well, although it's fairly common.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Well, it's more that I'm not sure that it's not the standard spelling for *that* meaning. One wouldn't say that "would" is an eggcorn for "wood", it's just a mistake when it's used in the context appropriate for the other.

"tear-veiled" seems to be a phrase in semi-common usage, too (including one reference to Baudelaire ("The wanderer looks into the tear-veiled distance, and hysterical tears well up in his eyes"), which suggests either a translator choice or an actual different word in French, as I assume without checking that they're not homophones there...). I suppose one could say that it's just back-constructed from an eggcorn, but it feels to me like it's staked out its own semantic space at this point.

[gale_storm]

Wow! Would that I had the energy...