More Word Usage and Abusage

I subscribe to a number of sites on grammar and word usage, intended mostly for other writers. Recently a post arrived that seemed interesting and I read through the examples of words and phrases used or spelled incorrectly, followed by the correct form. Alas, one example had the correct and incorrect forms reversed. That led me to an online exploration of eggcorns. (Remember those? We used to collect them as children but back then they were called acorns.)

Eggcorns, if you recall, are words or phrases known but misunderstood by the speaker and thus replaced by plausible, similar-sounding alternatives. The term was coined in 2003 by someone who misspelled acorn as eggcorn. Back when I was prone to collecting acorns I also collected cliches and eggcorns, trying to figure out how the human mind came up with them.

A phrase becomes a cliche, after all, because it has proved useful, and I wanted to grasp how several of these had sounded the first time they were used. Homer’s wine-dark sea, for example, has little meaning to someone who lives on the American Prairie or the Atlantic seaboard and looks out day after day on the undulating blues and sometimes greens and grays of bays and harbors. But one day, while sailing with my family, we were caught in a squall, and the aptness of “wine-dark sea” became vividly clear. Sometimes an eggcorn, phrase or term, reflects an uncertain grasp of the original intent but a determination to convey something close to the presumed meaning, and this, I think, reflects well on the speaker or writer. I’ve collected a few here, including the one that set me thinking about this topic.

saying (or writing):

“all intensive purposes” when you mean “all intents and purposes”

“daring-do” when you mean “derring-do”

“after all is set and done” when you mean “after all is said and done”

“a new leash on life” when you mean “a new lease on life”

The next (and last) one is the impetus for this post.

saying “to the manor born” when you mean “to the manner born”

Historians and etymologists might argue how the error arose (misunderstanding of the original phrase, intended satire, or social commentary), but the word manner is undoubtedly correct. The phrase was probably coined by Shakespeare, and appears in Hamlet (1602), Act 1, Scene 4:

HORATIO:     Is it a custom?

HAMLET:      Ay, marry, is’t./
      But to my mind, though I am native here/
      And to the manner born, it is a custom/
      More honoured in the breach than the observance.

According to the website (noted below), “The meaning is clear. Hamlet knows the custom being spoken of because he is native, that is, born locally.”

The editor of the site goes on to add: “The ‘manor’ version comes much later. The earliest reference I’ve found so far is in The Times, July 1859, in a story about the Emperor of France’s visit to Austria.” For more on this, go to http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/to-the-manner-born.html

For a list of eggcorns, go to

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/page/2

For a list of eggcorns, including the erroneous manor for manner, go to https://www.dailywritingtips.com/12-idioms-commonly-seen-with-homonymic-spelling-errors/

And for a list of my books, which I hope are cliche and error free (but probably not because I am, after all, human. Eek! Another cliche!), go to:

https://www.amazon.com/Susan-Oleksiw/e/B001JS3P7C

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/SusanOleksiw

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/susan+oleksiw?_requestid=1017995