An equestrian eggcorn
Arnold Zwicky writes about the eggcorn "chomping at the bit" in the Language Log today. This one came as some surprise to me. I've had horses for fifteen years, so I'd like to think I know something about what exactly it is that they do with bits. However, it seems I've been screwing this idiom up all along.
Something else surprised me recently: 'syllabication' gets 310,000 hits on Google, while 'syllabification' gets 33,000. I can't remember why we were looking this up sometime during Saturday's pre-dawn hours, but there you have it.
[Incidentally, I'm at home for spring break this week. It's nice to be back in CA, even though it's raining today.]
3 Comments:
This is why linguists - especially anyone dealing with historical languages - should know something about horses (and about war, and agriculture, and other preoccupations of the pre-modern mind). In modern English, it's just a few idioms, but for anything more than a few hundred years old, it runs through the entire language.
So, on the 'ch[a|o]mping at the bit' theme, I ran across the following bit of sanskrit last month:
prati-ksana-dashana-graha-mukti-khanakhanayita-khara-khaline'
"whose hard bit was set jingling by being grasped and released by his teeth at every moment" [from the 'harsacarita', by bana]
Being non-horsey myself, I could only understand this via the 'champ at the bit' idiom. And I'm completely lost when it comes to the 99% of horse things that haven't survived even as phrases. That's a surprisingly major handicap when you consider how much of sanskrit (or anglo-saxon, or norse, or latin, or greek) literature is either about horses, or relies on analogies involving them.
So perhaps linguistics and classics faculties should start sending their members to farms, and horse-races, and battle re-enactment groups. Not only would it give them a better idea of what the language actually meant, but it would be hilarious for the bystanders.
LOL, Dan! I agree. I could definitely see myself teaching Linguistics 103: Horses for Philologists.
I agree with Dan. Horsey howlers are not uncommon, likewise nautical ones - I have met several people astonished to learn that for people to be 'taken aback' is a metaphor from sailing boats. When the ship or dinghy is taken aback by getting the wind on the wrong side of the sail, things become wet, hasty and embarassing.
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