Jim Gordon suggests battening the hashes against the expression "hatch-marked" in a March 4 NYT story by Kirk Johnson, "Out of Old Mines' Muck Rises New Reclamation Model for West":
The property is hatch-marked by miles of unmarked and unmapped trails carved by generations of backcountry users at a time when no owner was around to say boo. [emphasis added]
Certainly the various forms of hash mark are commoner than the corresponding forms of hatch mark, as these MSN Search counts indicate:
+mark |
+marks |
+marked |
|
| hatch_ | 2,673 |
3,980 |
602 |
| hash_ | 89,584 |
38,887 |
829 |
| hatch | 329 |
490 |
181 |
| hash | 19,394 |
6,352 |
383 |
Total mhits for hatch: 8,255; total mhits for hash: 155,429. That's a 19-to-1 victory for hash. And hash mark makes the dictionary, while hatch mark doesn't (at least that's the situation in the AHD and the OED). On the other hand, hash(-)marked only beats out hatch(-)marked by 1212 to 783 (roughly 1.5 to 1) -- and both are rare -- suggesting that others are uncertain about this as well.
I wonder if deep down, Johnson might have meant to use the standard collocation "cross-hatched" rather than either "hatch-marked" or "hash-marked":
| +hatch | +hash | +hatched | +hashed | |
| cross_ | 47,075 |
1,083 |
32,245 |
30 |
| cross | 51,851 |
18 |
21,814 |
2 |
Total mhits for hatch: 152,985; total mhits for hash: 1,133. That's 135-to-1 for hatch in this case.
However, the kind of hatch in question is "An engraved line or stroke; esp. one of those by which shading is represented in an engraving" (the OED's gloss for hatch3), and so the compositional meaning of hatch-marked "marked by strokes" should be perfectly acceptable in the context of Johnson's sentence. Taking the other side, though, we can observe that this meaning of hatch is rather obscure, and hash mark and cross hatch(ed) are idiomatic collocations, so that many readers like Jim are going to suspect that Johnson's "hatch-marked" was a malapropism (or perhaps an eggcorn, since the sound is very close and the sense is also appropriate). In the end, this may be another Hobbesian choice.
And ironically, both hash and hatch have (I think) the same etymological source, which according to the OED is:
[a. F. hache (12thc. in Littré) = Sp. hacha, It. accia: -- OHG. *happja, whence hęppa, MHG. hepe scythe, bill, sickle.]
In the case of "hash mark" and "hash sign", there was apparently a recent transition from hatch -- "altered by popular etymology", as the OED delicately puts it.
So if Johnson is putting the hatch back in hash mark, perhaps he's not making a hatch of it after all: that's just how the old hatchet sometimes crumbles.
[ Curiously, hack (though similar in sound and also in core meaning) seems to have a different source:
[Early ME. hack-en, repr. OE. *haccian (whence tó-haccian to hack in pieces): -- Common WGer. *hakkôn: cf. OFris. to-hakia, MHG., MLG., MDu., G. hacken, mod.Du. hakken.]
]
Posted by Mark Liberman at March 6, 2006 06:47 AM