Guestmudgeon Lynn Nordhagen hates it when
people pour...
"Scholars pour
over their manuscripts looking for errors before publication."
Yes, of course, it should be
pore*. This is a good time to tell you about
The Eggcorn Database. What?
An eggcorn is the result of a word or part of a word being
"reanalyzed" and the spelling being altered to reflect the new meaning.
A good example is the pour/pore homophone pair. Many people are
not familiar with the verb pore, so they assume the word should be
pour. Pour used in the example our Guestmudgeon gives above
doesn't really make sense, but the human brain is an amazing thing and
people can rationalize just about anything. Perhaps in the above
example, they liken "looking intently" (the meaning of pore) to the
figurative "pouring one's eyes" over the material. Whatever the logic
(or lack thereof), there are plenty more examples of eggcorns in The Eggcorn
Database.
Eggcorn, by the way, is
an eggcorn (!) of the word acorn. Yes, apparently there are
numerous instances of folks thinking that an acorn was really an eggcorn!
Check out The Eggcorn Database for more information on the development of
the term eggcorn.
*The etymology of pore
is obscure, but there is a possibility that it is cognate with peer
(v.). |
Issue 202, page
3