<<shudder>>
I wish you had not shown me this website, except that now according to
(I believe it was) Mark Lew, I can be the life of any party.
David W. Fenton wrote:
On 23 Oct 2005 at 7:43, dhbailey wrote:
keith helgesen wrote:
I saw a newspaper(Ausie!)headline recently- *New Orleans batons down
the hatches* Gawd- I hate that!!
That's because down there, the pronunciation of the city Baton Rouge
makes the first word rhyme with "batten." People often resort to
spelling less familiar words the same as they spell more familiar
words.
It does make for an interesting evolution to the English language.
Well, "baton down the hatches" seems to be an Australianism, as if
you Google it, a very large proportion of the results are Australian
in origin, and none have anything to do with articles about Baton
Rouge.
This is what's called by linguists and "eggcorn" -- that is, a
homophone or near-homophone that replaces the original knowingly,
with a conscious rationalization of the otherwise nonsensical new
definition. It often happens with older, less common terms that get
replaced with more familiar ones, and then rationalized to fit.
"Batten/baton" is a perfect example, and not in the Eggcorn Database:
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/
I'll be suggesting it to the maintainers of the database.
By the way, the term "eggcorn" comes from a confusion of "eggcorn"
for "acorn," which I'd never heard of except in the context of the
discussion of linguistic eggcorns. This is explained in some detail
(along with some distinctions between malapropisms, Mondegreens and
other linguistic anomolies) a few paragraphs into the eggcorn
database's ABOUT page:
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/about/
And there's also this article that defines eggcorns even more
clearly:
Lady Mondegreen says her peace about egg corns
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000074.html
Given the number of you who seem to find homophone hunting amusing,
I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy eggcorns.
--
Robert Patterson
http://RobertGPatterson.com
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