As the Prospect postbag testifies, a 200-word article containing a misspelt proper noun can often generate more correspondence than a 5,000-word essay on tax, terrorism or cultural crises (to pick three fairly arbitrary “big” topics). Indeed, small problems are often a more passionate business than large ones—partly because worries like global warming inspire a more implacable dread than, say, typos in the Guardian. Psychologically and pragmatically, it’s more tolerable to be locally peeved than to fill a day with bottomless agonising.
There are also the questions of ownership and certainty. Things like political and environmental crises (especially when they are taking place, or are felt on a daily basis to be, “elsewhere”) are unlikely ever to be definitively articulated, and can never be said to the sole province of even the most excellent expert. A little research, however, may give us a comprehensive answer on a point of grammar or etymology—a nugget of certainty we can safely carry through the rest of our days, and which we can intermittently inflict on those around us.
In the spirit of such pleasures, here are a few examples from my favourite flavour of verbal error: spelling slips caused by mistaken etymologies.
“in the sticks” (i.e. the middle of nowhere) is sometimes given as “in the styx,” because people think the phrase refers to the mythological river Styx when, in fact, it’s an early 20th century American term which simply means out in the wooded countryside
“penchant” is sometimes given as “pendant,” because people know that it’s related to ideas of hanging or tending towards something. It does indeed originate from the Latin pendere, to hang—but because it came to English via old French pencher, it lost the “d” still retained in the English “pendant.”
“jejune” is sometimes given as “jejeune,” and pronounced in a French style (with soft rather than hard “j’s”) because people think it’s etymologically related to the French jeune, meaning a youth. Actually, the word comes to us directly from the Latin jejunus, meaning empty or barren.
“straitlaced” is sometimes given as “straight-laced,” because people (quite sensibly) assume it refers to the straightness of lacing. It does, but via the English term for a style of lacing on corsets that resembled a “strait” in the geographical sense, i.e. that was narrow and confining. Language being a thing of ceaseless motion, however, it seems almost certain that “straight” will take over eventually.
And feel free to tell me if I’m wrong or ridiculous on any of these. My next favourite category is “common errors made in common corrections of common errors.”
“Plain sailing” instead of “plane sailing”, from navigation over small distances when spherical trigonometry is not important? Or does this come into your next favorite category? And if not, is ‘plain sailing’ now correct (or at least admissible) on the basis that usage is determined by all users, not just us pedants?
Hmm. That’s a nicely tricky example, partly because the fairly interchangeable use of “plane” and “plain” seems to go back almost as far as the phrase; and the only pre-1700 examples I can find in fact spell it “plain.” A 1677 “Mathematical Manual: Containing Tables of Logarithms for Numbers,” for instance, has a whole section devoted to what it calls
“Plain Sailing, which is only to be used in Small Distances, near the Equinoctial, where the Degrees of Longitude are just equal to the Degrees of Latitude…”
Spelling pedantry is perhaps a unrewarding mistress when error and slippage are so often the historical rule rather than the exception. I hope we can all agree, however, that it is always proper and enriching to probe the origins of words in order to use them better in the present!
Super reply - raises the whole discussion to a higher plain….