Retrieval error?

From the October 16 issue of the Stanford Linguistics Department’s newsletter The Sesquipedalian:

… and more than a dozen of the participants are expected to join the Linguistics Happy Hour at 4 pm  after the workshop adjoins at 3.

The writer was probably aiming for adjourn but (in a Fay/Cutler malapropism moment) retrieved the phonologically similar adjoin instead. Or maybe it’s a classical malapropism, in which the writer had stored adjoin where most people have adjourn. (It’s often hard to distinguish the two phenomena in particular cases. But I can ask the Sesqui about the writer’s intentions.)

Not surprisingly, it’s not in Brians’s Common Errors or on the Eggcorn Database. You can find a few more examples on the web, for instance:

It is anticipated that the Gunnar Myrdal Lecture will be held on Wednesday, 5 March, at 4.30 in the afternoon.  The formal meeting of the Commission will adjoin at 4:30 p.m. with the lecture to be held in the same meeting room. (link)

The Symposium will commence with a continental breakfast at 8 am and will adjoin at noon. (link)

It seems to be an error of the educated, in relatively elevated contexts.

“we believe who”

In a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode:

… the man we believe who attacked you

Something has gone wrong here; the question is what.

contempt/content

In an earlier posting, I reported on an instance of contempt for content, in the expression to your heart’s content. I saw no semantic motivation for the substitution, so I was reluctant to classify the example as an eggcorn (and the substitution hasn’t been discussed on the ecdb site). Instead, the relationship seemed phonological — which would suggest that the example is a classical malapropism originating (as a fair number of CMs do) in a mis-hearing.

Whatever its origins, to one’s heart’s contempt turns out to be surprisingly common. There are thousands of webhits (but none in Google News and only a few in Google Books, so the error doesn’t seem to be spreading into the mainstream), for instance:

… chances are you will be able to scream, yell and panic to your heart’s contempt – briefly – but you won’t be better off for it (link)

“… well, believe what you will, shutter your limited mind to your heart’s contempt.” (Jonathan Kellerman, Self-Defense, p. 428)

So in the mean time…. I am going to travel, play sports, hike and bake to my heart’s contempt ….. (link)

He intended to smoke to his heart’s contempt during this trip. (James W. Foster, Tales of Vollmer’s Hollow, p. 117)

There are also some hits for contempt to VP ‘content to VP’, as in:

The wife was more tired than I and was quite contempt to stay horizontal. So I told her to enjoy her nap … (link)

If it weren’t for the technology being what it is today, I’d be quite contempt to travel back in time – living through the 60s and 70s. (link)

Finally, the reverse substitution, of content for contempt, is attested for in contempt of court, and has been noted in the Eggcorn Forum. A few examples:

Bashir was warned that he might be found in content of court Tuesday if he continues refusing to answer questions. (link)

“The defendant conducted himself with such buffoonery during the beginning of the trial that the judge was forced to hold him in content of court for the remainder of the proceedings.” (link)

The judge indicated the two could be arrested by Federal agents and held in content of court for failure to abide by the injunction. (link)

In the Eggcorn Forum, Peter Forster suggested (on January 7) that the substitution was a cupertino, but commenter nilep doubted this (on January 10) and suggested instead that it was a demi-eggcorn, but even that analysis is dubious, since contempt is a noun while content (with accent on the second syllable) is an adjective; the substitution looks phonologically motivated (again, probably as a result of an initial mis-hearing).

A bag of error

In the latest (September 26) University South News (Palo Alto CA), Eileen Meyer has collected mis-steps in the Palo Alto Weekly’s “Town Square” column:

[about city salaries] “…do not believe their exuberant salaries are justified.”

I shutter to think what you would do if you …

Eat to you’re heart’s greasy contempt.

I BOYCOTT TARGET for being greety

… make our voices known to the City Council and undue the damage that has already been done

Some of these are old friends: exuberant for extravagant is in the Eggcorn Database here, shutter for shudder here, undue for undo in the entry here for the opposite substitution. Contempt for content and greety for greedy are new to me; I don’t see a semantic motivation for the substutions, but both are phonologically motivated.

Greasy in heart’s greasy contempt is something of a puzzle, especially without any context. There are some occurrences on the web of greasy contempt, but they all seem to be about contempt, not being contented. Maybe greasy was intended literally, as a reference to greasy food, or maybe it was another substitution for greedy.

That leaves YOU’RE for YOUR — an extremely common spelling error.

The ants are my friends

Just finished Martin Toseland’s The Ants Are My Friends: Misheard Lyrics, Malapropisms, Eggcorns, and Other Linguistic Gaffes (hardback in 2007, paperback in 2009), a collection, meant for general readers, of phenomena that should be familiar to readers of this blog and of Language Log: mondegreens, eggcorns, and (non-eggcorn) classical malapropisms. (Key to title: Bob Dylan’s line “the answer, my friends” (is blowin’ in the wind).)

There are many old friends here, attractively presented and engagingly discussed, and Toseland largely avoids the mocking tone that many people talking about mistakes take to those who produce them.

I haven’t checked Toseland’s eggcorn examples to see how many of them are in the Eggcorn Database, or at least mentioned in the Eggcorn Forum, but a quick sampling suggests that most of them have come by the eggcornologists. I have a modest collection of classical malapropisms, but I’m not aiming at completeness there; and though there are some on-line collections of mondegreens, I’m not keeping files on them myself.

Toseland describes himself on his webpage as “an author, ghostwriter, freelance publisher and literary agent”. Ants was the first book published under his own name. It’s now been followed by A Steroid Hit The Earth: A Celebration of Misprints, Typos and Other Howlers (hardback in 2008, paperback in 2009), which I haven’t looked at yet.

Lightweight stuff, but entertaining; it would probably be enjoyed by someone who’s interested in language-y stuff, but not to the point of following linguablogs.

Nuanced

On NPR’s Morning Edition on Thursday (August 27), reporter Steve Inskeep mixed it up with Michael Steele, the Republican Party Chairman, on health care. Here’s an excerpt from the middle of the transcript:

INSKEEP: You said that’s something that should be looked into. Who is it that should look into that?
Mr. STEELE: I’m talking about those who – well, who regulates the insurance markets?
INSKEEP: That would be the government, I believe.
Mr. STEELE: Well, and so it – wait a minute, hold up. You know, you’re doing a wonderful little dance here and you’re trying to be cute, but the reality of this is very simple. I’m not saying the government doesn’t have a role to play. I’ve never said that. The government does have a role to play. The government has a very limited role to play.
INSKEEP: Mr. Chairman, I respect that you feel that I’m doing a dance here. I just want you to know that as a citizen, I’m a little confused by the positions you take because you’re giving me a very nice nuanced position here.
Mr. STEELE: It’s not nice and nuanced. I’m being very clear.
INSKEEP: You’re giving me, nevertheless, a nuanced position, a careful…
Mr. STEELE: What’s nuanced? What don’t you understand?
INSKEEP: What nuance means is you’re not doing it absolutely black and white. You’re saying you recognize the government has a role to play here, but when you…
Mr. STEELE: Wait a minute. But that is the – is that a…
INSKEEP: …and your party…
Mr. STEELE: …not reality?
INSKEEP: Come to the actual rhetoric, it seems more along the lines of absolutes. It’s between the patient and the doctor.
Mr. STEELE: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t accept your premise. And, you know, you have your view and you can see it as nuanced all you want. But the reality of it is I’m being…
INSKEEP: I’m not saying nuanced is a bad thing, sir.
Mr. STEELE: I’m being very clear. I want to have an open debate. I want to put ideas out there. I want the people to understand what this is going to look like when it’s all said and done. And I’m not – you know, seriously, I’m not trying to be nuanced. I’m not trying to be cute. I’m trying to be very clear. I’m not saying the government doesn’t have a role to play here. It does. It’s managing a Medicare program, so it has a role to play.
INSKEEP: Maybe we’re getting hung up on the word nuance. Maybe I should say complicated. Do you find it challenging to get into this complicated debate and explain things to people in a way that it’s honest to the facts and still very clear and doesn’t just kind of scare people with soundbites?
Mr. STEELE: That’s a good point, then. Well no. Look, no one’s trying to scare people with soundbites. I mean, you know, I’ve not done that, and I don’t know any of the leaders in the House and Senate that have done that. And so, yeah, it’s complicated, and you want to break it down.

Steele seems to think that nuanced means something like ‘unclear’ or ‘obfuscated’ and so conveys a negative judgment. This as against the OED’s definition (draft revision December 2003) — ‘Possessing or exhibiting delicate gradations in tone, expression, meaning, etc.’ — which is certainly positive.

But you can see how someone might come to Steele’s understanding of nuanced, from contexts in which some position is expressed with provisos, limitations, exceptions, and the like, which some might see as obfuscating a point that should be clear. That is, the negative understanding of nuanced is a “private meaning” (see Language Log discussion here).

Mrs. Malaprop lives!

On 24 May, Bill Palmer reported (on ADS-L) a nice classical malapropism, contiguous > contagious, in a letter to the editor of the Chapel Hill News:

…Walgreen’s also purchased four contagious parcels at the intersection of…

I then googled up a few more examples of “contagious parcels” and some of “48 contagious states” and “contagious countries”. And discovered, in that last search, that Mrs. Malaprop herself had been to this territory. From Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals, Act I, Scene II:

MRS. MALAPROP: I would have her instructed in geometry, that she might know something of the contagious countries.

(That’s geometry ‘geography’.)

Handbook of WHAT?

Eli Anne Eiesland reports from Oslo:

I was accessing the Handbook of Morphology (edited by you and Andrew Spencer), in its electronic version on NetLibrary, and found a bizarre misprint. The thumbnail image of the book says “handbook of mythology”.

Oh dear. I hope this isn’t an accusation that Andy and I made up the data in the Handbook.

(I hadn’t realized that the volume was available on-line. But, apparently, only through a library that’s affiliated with NetLibrary.)

spendthrift ‘penurious person’

Benita Bendon Campbell passes on this wonderful bit from Cathy Guisewites’s strip Cathy:

Here we get a series of ‘penurious’ items: cost-conscious, penny-pinching, prudent, budget-minded. In the midst of these comes spendthrift, clearly intended to convey ‘penurious’, though in fact its standard use is to refer to a profligate spender.

How does this happen? Well, spendthrift has thrift in it, suggesting thrifty. ‘Thrifty in spending’ and all that. People are forever trying to figure out the meanings of multi-part words from the meanings of their parts, but that doesn’t always work. As in this case.

Malaprop from Calgary

In his first speech since leaving the presidency, George W. Bush announced that he plans to write a book, and in so doing stumbled into a malapropism. From the 17 March AP story by Rob Gillies, as carried by MSNBC:

CALGARY, Alberta – Former President George W. Bush said that he won’t criticize Barack Obama because the new U.S. president “deserves my silence,” and said he plans to write a book about the 12 toughest decisions he made in office.

… The invitation-only event titled a “Conversation with George W. Bush” attracted close to 2,000 guests who paid US$3,100 per table. Bush received two standing ovations from the predominantly business crowd.

… Bush said that he doesn’t know what he will do in the long term but that he will write a book that will ask people to consider what they would do if they had to protect the United States as president.

He said it will be fun to write and that “it’s going to be (about) the 12 toughest decisions I had to make.”

“I’m going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there’s an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened,” Bush said.

This could be an ordinary classical malapropism (Bush thinks authoritarian means ‘authoritative). Or it could be a Fay/Cutler malapropism, an inadvertent error in word retrieval, based on phonological similarity. Many commenters have suggested it was a Freudian slip.

(Hat tip to Geoff Pullum.)