No punctuation in contractions? Well never accept it, will we?
Oh, what a fount of inspiration is that little bird. Watching the Scotland vs. Ireland Six Nations Match on Saturday (10 March) and tweeting at the same time added to the thrills and spills, even if it meant missing a few crucial moments. (Even J.K. Rowling was tweeting. Gosh! Scotland lost abysmally, btw.) And it can throw up the odd language curiosity. One such was ‘Scotland are their own worse enemy’.
Yay! Another eggcorn spotted in the wild. This one is not in the ‘famed’ (how I loathe, detest and revile that word, which I only put in so that I could say quite how much…) eggcorn database, so there was no illumination to be found there as I wondered how frequent it might be.
It also piqued my curiosity in other ways.
Is the eggcorn on the increase?
How old is the eggcorn?
How did the eggcorn come about?
Where does the original phrase come from?
My example has plural concord (Scotland are their own worse enemy) but enemy is singular. So, how often do people say ‘enemies’ in such cases?
How frequent is the eggcorn?
That, I thought, is going to depend on where you look, surely?
As it turns out, it does, but the differences are not huge. Three different corpora I consulted give figures ranging from just under 2 per cent to 3.63 per cent of all occurrences of both forms.
A Google for “own worse enemy” in quotation marks scores 32,700 against “own worst enemy” at 2,590,000, but I suspect that doesn’t prove anything very much.
I couldn’t tell you. When I entered the search string ‘own worse enemy_INF’ in Google Ngrams, it plotted a seemingly vertiginous rise from the 1980s onwards. But the numbers are so small they don’t tell you very much. If you enter both strings], i.e. …worse… and …worst…, you can see a much gentler rise for …worst…, going back to the nineteenth century.
Coming across any eggcorn, one might be tempted to tut-tut, shake one’s head, and condemn modern illiteracy. If you are so tempted, refrain. Like many other eggcorns and ‘mistakes’, …own worse enemy has a venerable history—at least as far as Ngrams goes—1881 being its premiere there.
‘It is not too much to say that the man who has any interest in fruit production or selling in this State, and yet places obstructions in the way of the execution of laws intended to foster that industry, is his own worse enemy, and a blind leader of the blind.’ This seems to have to do with a crisis in the horticultural industry of aphis on pear and apple trees, i.e. probably greenfly and blackfly.
How did/does it come about?
And I’m own worst enemy because I put off blogging, and then weeks go by I don’t post anything.
I don’t support England, btw, in rugger. Wales, generally, and then Scotland. As Wales are doing badly, I turncoated, and obviously the Sco-Eng match was a joy, but for sporting, not racial, reasons. The Scots played superbly. As for the spelling, the Dictionar o the Scots Leid saith MOLOCATE, v. also molecate, mollicate, mollocate, malacate, so you spelling is one of the alternatives. It’s a shame they don’t show the etymology. I won’t say ‘Age is just a number’.
I agree, ‘age IS just a number’. Fortunately, despite stray white wisps poking through my hot pink hair, I look 10 years younger than my chronological age. As someone reminded me kindly before the latest birthday: “the alternative to getting older is death”.
Enjoy your birthday, & may you have many more fun ones.
See what you’ve started with your Scotch funicular, Tricia – see below on ‘stoater’ etc.
Stoater! I haven’t heard that word in years! There are parts of Antrim where people use it. Unfortunately, age is just a number – about an additonal inch around the waist for every year since I hit forty, in my case … 😦 Enjoy the match – I am certainly looking forward to it!
Stoater! What’s the meaning of such a wonderful word? Is it Scots or Irish or both? I had a Scottish granny, much loved, who gave me “wersh” for needing salt, especially porridge, but any food, really. The other word I use frequently is “skunner” for active dislike. I frequently “take a skunner” to someone, generally a politician. My children know what I mean by these expressions, but good Aussies that they are, don’t use them.
Please see my comments below on ‘stoater’, etc.
John (Debunker) and Sue & Tricia – well, the ball has really started rolling with stoater. Suffice (it) to say, that the Ire v. Eng match was an absolute stoater of a match, i.e. totally brilliant. Yes, it’s very Scots, and, I have to take John’s word, also (part)-Irish.
Related, I presume, are a) verb – to stoat, meaning ‘to bounce’, e.g. the rain was stoating off the roof, and b) (presumably related) stoatin, meaning very drunk, so presumably bouncing around. I can’t find any of those words in the Scots Dictionary, or the OED, though they are here http://www.scotranslate.com/translate/scottish/stoat/1/239#.Wq7YvajFLIU.
It’s here in the DSL: http://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/scunner and, on that evidence, goes back at least to 18thC.
Thanks so much, Jeremy & John. What a delight following the links and reading all the citations. My granny had several of O. Douglas’ novels, which I read as a child. Granny lived next door to us, so we went to her after school, & once we’d done our homework we could read any book we liked. Such warm memories; not wersh at all.