Gene Buckley emailed to point out the widespread adoption of the eggcorn inclimate weather, which has 11,000 whG (web hits on Google), or 2,567 whG/bp (web hits on Google per billion pages). The original phrase inclement weather has 173,000 whG or about 40,372 whG/bp, so the original is only about 16 times commoner than the eggcorn. This is a genuine folk-etymology-in-progress, not a simple misspelling, since the morphologically incoherent "incliment weather" and "inclemate weather" have only 719 whG and 73 whG respectively.
"Inclimate weather" is especially common for a case in which the error is not a recognized orthographic word of English, and so will be caught by any spelling-correction program. Compare (say) feint of heart or reigns of power or honing in on, where spelling correction would have to use a phrasal lexicon and a modest imitation of artificial intelligence.
I surmise that this is why inclimate is rare (though not absent) in journalistic writing, unlike (some of the) eggcorns that map words onto words. Journalists (or their editors) presumably use spelling correction programs. By the numerical evidence, they are also slightly more literate than the public at large, when voyaging beyond the safe harbors of wordlist-based spelling correction:
whG (web) |
whG (news) |
|
| inclimate weather | 11,000 |
1 |
| inclement weather | 173,000 |
1,080 |
| original/eggcorn ratio | 15.7 |
1,080 |
| feint of heart | 3,920 |
1 |
| faint of heart | 151,000 |
223 |
| original/eggcorn ratio | 38.5 |
223 |
| reigns of power | 7,770 |
28 |
| reins of power | 23,700 |
119 |
| original/eggcorn ratio | 3.05 |
4.25 |
| honing in on | 12,500 |
29 |
| homing in on | 23,900 |
92 |
| original/eggcorn ratio | 1.9 |
3.2 |
These are poignant examples of humanity's search for meaning in its linguistic experience, thwarted only in part by technology.
Posted by Mark Liberman at June 1, 2004 04:25 AM