Chomping at the font
chompfont
My last -- both most recent and probably also final --
inventory
of (possible) eggcorns elicited a certain amount of e-mail,
almost all of it about two items in the inventory:
chomp at the bit (for
champ at the bit) and
font of knowledge (for
fount of knowledge). (In the
second,
knowledge stands in
for a variety of abstract nouns.) My correspondents -- in
alphabetical order, Rich Alderson, Jim Apple, John Cowan, Chris Shea,
Wendy Sonnenberg, and Nathan Vaillette -- point out, about one or both
of these usages, that the items have been alternatives for a long time
(since Early Modern English or even Late Old English); that most
current dictionaries list them as alternatives; and that the Google
numbers and the correspondents' own usage favor the variants I've
labeled as eggcorns (Vaillette gets around 79k hits for
chomping at the bit vs. 30k hits
for
champing at the bit, a
usage he reports he'd never even heard of before, and around 8.5k for
font of knowledge, which is what he
says, vs. 7.2k for
fount of knowledge).
I grant all this, but still maintain that both expressions had an
eggcorn moment in their history, though they have now become "nearly
mainstream", as we say on the
eggcorn
database. One of the lessons here is that dictionaries, even
very good ones, don't -- in fact, can't -- tell you everything you need
to know.
In both cases, the words (
champ/chomp,
fount/font) have a history as
alternatives, but then differentiated in their uses. Relatively
recently, though, one (
chomp,
font) has been overtaking the other
(this is the possibly-eggcorn phase); in both cases, the more familiar,
and more frequent, item has been replacing the less familiar/frequent
(but phonologically similar) one, to the point where for many people
the replacements are the
ONLY available forms.
Even very good dictionaries are not particularly good at telling you
relative frequencies of usages at different periods -- actually, such
information is very hard to come by -- so there's only so much you can
conclude from their entries.
For
champ/chomp the history
is easy to work out:
chomp
continued to be available as a verb meaning 'munch on, bite', while
champ became confined to the idiom
champ at the bit 'be restive' and
perhaps a few other related idioms, like
champing to [
get home] 'anxious to [get
home]'. Until very recently, idiom dictionaries listed only
champ at the bit (if they had the idiom
at all): see the
BBI Combinatory
Dictionary of English (1986, corrected 1993);
NTC's American Idioms Dictionary (2nd
ed., 1994); the Makkai et al.
Dictionary
of American Idioms (3rd ed., 1995); and the
Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (1999),
which lists
chafe as a variant of
champ. Some general
dictionaries -- the British
Chambers
Dictionary (1998) and the
American
Heritage Dictionary (4th ed., 2000) -- continue to
distinguish the specialized
champ
in
champ at the bit from the
munching sense, for which
chomp
is listed as a variant.
Now, here's a situation that's just ripe for reshaping. The now
very rare verb
champ occurs
in only one or two idioms, where its meaning contribution is
unclear. The phonologically similar verb
chomp, however, is available, and
makes some sense. (Replacing
champ
by
chomp actually revives the
original metaphor in the
at the bit expression,
though most current speakers won't appreciate that.) So
chomp spreads rapidly, and quickly
becomes just the way you say this.
This change is now recognized in some reference works. The
Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus (2004),
in particular, has a usage note on
chomp,
champ (p. 140), which recognizes the
chomp at the bit wording as an
American variant but claims that it's slightly less common in
contemporary print sources than the
champ
variant. Pretty much the same discussion appears in
Garner's Modern American Usage
(2003), also from Oxford University Press.
Dictionaries are, for good reason, slow to recognize changes. My
guess is that Garner and the
Oxford
American Writer's Thesaurus are just a bit behind the times.
On to
fount/font. My
story here is that these two nouns, both traceable back to Latin
fons 'spring, fountain', also
specialized, in different directions, with
fount
tending to be reserved for poetic and metaphorical uses (essentially, a
"fancy" shortening of
fountain
in the extended senses 'source, hoard') and
font largely reserved for baptismal
fonts and similar pools of water. Dictionaries of quotations
support this story:
Bartlett's
Familiar Quotations (14th ed., 1968) has three cites for
fount 'fountain, source' and one
for
font 'pool' (from
Tennyson's
The Princess); the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
(3rd. ed., 1979) has one cite for
fount
'fountain, source' and two for
font
(the Tennyson, plus one for a baptismal font); and the
Chambers Dictionary of Quotations
(1996) has one metaphorical
fount
(
of pride) and the Tennyson
"Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font".
Still, the cites in the larger dictionaries indicate that over the
years there have been occasional metaphorical uses of
font, which now seem to be
overtaking
fount at a great
rate (from
AHD4: "She was a
font of wisdom and good sense"). This should not be entirely
surprising, since
fount is so
strikingly "poetic" in tone, while
font
has concrete uses, with reference to baptismal fonts and, most
important, to type fonts. The
font of
type font has a different history
from the occurrences of
font
I've been talking about, but since the advent of computer typesetting
and word processors, pretty much everybody has become (only too)
familiar with the word. It's familiar and frequent, and even
though it doesn't make perfect sense in expressions like
font of wisdom, it has those other
virtues; after all,
fount
doesn't make a lot of sense, either. (To make all of this even
more complex, apparently British usage favored
type fount until fairly recently,
when the American usage with
font
swamped it. This suggests that metaphorical uses of
font originated mostly in the
U.S.) It's also possible that baptismal
font, with its
associations to beginnings, contributed to the spread of metaphorical
font.
In any case, we've now reached the state where lots of speakers,
especially Americans and especially younger ones, use only
font for the metaphorical senses
and find
fount bizarre (and
fountain perhaps a bit too
literal). Every once in a while, one of these speakers will
report with surprise their discovery that their
font might be an eggcorn (as Philip
Hofmeister did in e-mail to me the week before last). And it
probably was, once.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 28, 2005 03:29 PM