Cow-towing to Celsius
The Scientific Activist of 10/13/07
reported
on
responses to an announcement by Chief
Meteorologist Tim Heller on
Houston ABC-13's Weather Blog when he announced that the TV station's
weather report would now include temperatures in Celsius in addition to
Fahrenheit.
Among the ranting responses was this one, with the wonderful
cow-tow in it:
This is just another example of giving
in to people who come here from
other countries and are too lazy to learn our ways (English, non-metric
temps, etc.). Why should they have to learn our ways, we feed them
their ways so they don't have to bother. This is a TERRIBLE idea. If I
need to know how to convert something from metric to American temps, I
will get a book and figure it out or find it on the internet. They
should do the same. With the internet, anything can be learned without
it having to be fed to us. I don't expect other countries to cow-tow to
my English, we should NOT cow-tow to their language and desires to not
bother to learn our language and ways.
(Hat tip to Paul Armstrong.)
Before I go on to
cow-tow,
here are a couple more responses about the Celsius threat to the
American Way of Life in which the metric system and language are tied:
NO, on celsius. This is the United
States of America. We speak English
and use Fahrenheit. Well, I guess you could show wind speed in
kilometers, too. Where does it stop? I guess when we become a Spanish
speaking nation.
Just another concession to political correctness and liberalism. By
compromising our language, our culture, our standards, and the like we
only enable those who refuse to assimilate and only wish to be leeches
upon our largesse.
There are more. To be fair, there are also critical replies to
the ravings.
Now for
cow-tow (also spelled
solid, as
cowtow, and
separated, as
cow tow).
This one is in Brians, under
cowtow/kowtow,
and was noted in
a
discussion on the Eggcorn Forum back in March. You can google
up a pile of hits; it's all over the place. The question then is
whether this is a simple misspelling, with initial /k/ spelled by the
more common C rather than K; or a spelling like
pail for
pale in
beyond the pail (more on this
below); or an eggcorn in which cows are somehow involved (a possibility
that the posters on the forum found unlikely). It is, of course,
possible that different people have hit on the spelling by different
routes.
As background for further discussion, I note that eggcorns come in
three types:
Type 1, involving semantic reanalysis
of some part of an expression that is not reflected in spelling.
These are
HIDDEN EGGCORNS, like
the die is cast taken to refer to
casting things in molds, rather than throwing dice (in the ecdb
here).
Type 2, involving semantic reanalysis of some part of an expression
that's reflected in spelling but not in pronunciation, as in
the dye is cast, with the
expression taken to refer to coloring things (in the ecdb
here).
Type 3, involving semantic reanalysis of some part of an expression
that's reflected in both spelling and pronunciation, as in
mindgrain for
migraine (in the ecdb
here).
In these classic eggcorns, there is a reanalysis of one or more parts
of an expression as representing lexical material not in the original
and contributing to the (perceived) semantics of the result. In
types 2 and 3, the reanalysis is reflected in the spelling.
But there are other errors in which one or more parts of an expression
are re-spelled so as to replace opaque parts by recognizable lexical
material, but without any noticeable improvement in the semantics; what
gives rise to them is a drive to find familiar elements as much as
possible. I'll call these
DEMI-EGGCORNS.
The errors that I called
PAILS in
an
earlier posting -- named for the
pail
of
beyond the pail -- are
demi-eggcorns: they provide familiar parts that nevertheless don't
contribute meaning to the resulting expression.
Of course it's possible that once the reanalysis has been made by some
people, others will find some way to rationalize the result.
Maybe there are people who think pails are involved when something is
beyond the pail.
And maybe there are people who think that cows are involved in
cow-tow. But I'd guess that
many people who use this spelling are just pleased to see a familiar
element,
cow, in the
expression, and treat the whole expression as yet another puzzling
idiom of English. That is, I'm suggesting that many occurrences
of
cow-tow are demi-eggcorns
(some probably are simple misspellings) -- of a type corresponding to
the type 2 eggcorns above, with spelling altered but pronunciation
preserved.
So you're asking if there are demi-eggcorns corresponding to the type 3
eggcorns above. Here's a candidate, from a discussion on the
American Dialect Society mailing list back in September:
southmore, as in "freshman
southmore junior senior":
Clubs: Track, Basketball,
Freshman/Southmore Choir, Powderpuff Football, Intramural Football,
& Senior Yearbook Committee, ... (
link)
You were strong as a freshman on this board, but then you suffered from
the southmore slump. I was starting to lose hope, but damn son, you are
right back ... (
link)
CLASS STARS:
1125 FR - Freshman
1125SO - Southmore
1125JR - Junior
1125SN - Senior (
link)
hey, i am abrahan garza, class of 1997, and was in band from 1994 to
1997 minus my southmore year when i was the mascot. (
link)
This variant (which seems to be widely distributed in the U.S. and,
from testimony on ADS-L, goes back to the 19th century) is clearly
based on the disyllabic pronunciation of
sophomore, with both the vowel and
the offset consonant of the first syllable reshaped so as yield a
familiar English word,
south,
in place of the unfamiliar first syllable of the original. Maybe
some people think the compass point has something to do with the second
year of college, but I suspect that the motive for the reshaping is
primarily the search for familiar elements, for some people quite
possibly encouraged by the
south
of the equally opaque
southpaw.
(Larry Horn, who made this suggestion on ADS-L, noted that historically
southpaw is compositional, but
with an etymology that hardly anyone appreciates; for most people, it's
just a idiomatic compound. For the etymology, see
southpaw in AHD4.)
To sum up, I'm suggesting that there are two drives behind reshapings:
to find familiar elements as much as possible, and to find meaning as much as possible. Classic eggcorns show both
effects, demi-eggcorns only the first.
Cow-tow looks like a type 2
demi-eggcorn,
southmore like
a type 3 demi-eggcorn.
An entertaining final note: back in November 2005 on the Eggcorn Forum,
Ken Lakritz
noted
cow toe as a variant spelling
of
kowtow. He suggested
that showing deference by kissing someone's toe might be involved in
this version -- but it could be based on a mispronunciation of written
{kowtow} (or {cow-tow}), based on the fact that {tow} can be pronounced
like
toe.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 15, 2007 02:42 PM