The Economist July 17th 2021 Books & arts 73O
n june 12thThe Economist’s pages
featured an activist investor “honing
in on the dearth of energy experience” on
a company’s board. A few readers honed
in on a solecism: the original phrase is to
“home in” on something, like the crea
tures that find their way back to their
nests—that is, they “home”—with sur
prising precision.
Yet according to Google Books,
“honed in on” is about threequarters as
common in published works as “homed
in on”. MerriamWebster, a dictionary
publisher, considers “hone in” an estab
lished variant, even if “home in” is better
(by virtue of being older, and so less
likely to attract censure). What makes
“hone in” so tempting?
In 2003 the linguists behind the Lan
guage Log blog coined the term “eggcorn”
for a particular kind of mishearing of a
word or phrase. There are other varieties
of mishearings, but they are not egg
corns. A “mondegreen” is a nonsensical
one, often of a song lyric. An elegiac tune
with the line “and laid him on the green”
was heard as “and Lady Mondegreen”,
giving the phenomenon its name. A
website called KissThisGuy.com (from a
mishearing of “excuse me while I kiss the
sky”) collects others.
A malapropism is another kind of
misunderstanding—attempting to use a
posh word but choosing a similarsound
ing term instead. It was named after Mrs
Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley
Sheridan’s play “The Rivals” of 1775; she
reached for refined words and inevitably
found the wrong one, saying things like
“the very pineapple of politeness” for
“pinnacle”. The song “A Word a Day” from
“Top Banana”, a musical, features mala
propisms in reverse. The singer, quizzed
on the meaning of “amphibious”, defines
it as “someone who can use either hand”. The eggcorn, though, is more venera
ble. The word began as a misconstrual of
“acorn”. Unlike a malapropism or mon
degreen, the eggcorn has a logic that
makes it alluring. Acorns and eggs have
similar shapes, and both produce new life.
Indeed, “acorn” may itself be an eggcorn;
its original form, aecern,may have been
gradually adapted by speakers who
thought it was a kind of “corn”.
Hence the popularity of “hone in”. To
“home in on” something is to gradually
approach a target. To “hone” a blade is to
gradually make it more suitable to your
purpose. The overlapping meanings make
“hone in” a tempting swap. There are so
many sensibleseeming alterations of this
sort that Chris Waigl, a geophysicist in
Alaska, has collected 648 of them in her
online Eggcorn Database.
Some eggcorns are especially enticing
because they make more sense than the
phrases they replace. Consider “death
nail”, which is more plausible on its face
than “death knell”. Nails go along with
death (as in “nail in the coffin”), and some
people may not know of any other kind ofknell (originally the sound of a bell).
The substitution of a rarely used word
with an everyday equivalent is the hall
mark of many eggcorns. For instance,
linguists invented “codeswitching” to
describe the practice of moving back and
forth between two languages or dialects,
often in one conversation or even sen
tence. It is a fascinating phenomenon
with a clumsy name. When a reviewer for
the Toronto Star, writing about the black
characters in the film “Moonlight”, de
scribed their “coatswitching”, he argu
ably improved it.
So if you chuckle when you read “the
point is mute”, “in one foul swoop” or “to
change tact”, ask yourself whether you
could give precise definitions of “moot”,
“fell” or “tack”. The speakers replacing
them with more common words are in a
way the opposite of Mrs Malaprop; rather
than trying to show off, they are often
making opaque expressions simpler.
George Orwell once mocked “tow the
line” for “toe the line” in a passage about
people who use metaphors without
thinking about them. He was criticising
those who write automatically, stitching
platitudes together without reflection.
His advice to avoid clichés is always
salutary; his injunction to think about
what the words you use really mean is an
even better one. But his judgment here
was a little too harsh.
“Tow the line” was an eggcorn avant la
lettre: if you obediently do your political
party’s bidding, you might just as easily
pull a rope at their command as you
would stand on a mark they have made
on the ground. The people who reach for
this seemingly jumbled phrase are think
ing—and coming up with an expression
that is clearer to them than the original.
Eggcorns are often a sign not of idiocy
but of ingenuity.Sometimes solecisms can reveal linguistic ingenuityJohnsonDeath nails and foul swoops
too. Plastic bags and packaging have been
spotted by submersibles in the seven
miledeep Mariana Trench. Nuclear waste,
chemicals and oil spills, such as the one
from the Deepwater Horizon rig in 2010,
have turned sections of sea floor into poi
sonous dumps. Exploitation adds to the
blight. The orange roughy, a whitefleshed
fish that congregates around seamounts
(also known, less appetisingly, as a slime
head) has been dangerously overfished.
An experimental push to harvest sea
floor nodules laced with manganese,
nickel, cobalt and other metals is another
threat. The potential damage to the seabed
from remotely operated machines is anal
ogous, Ms Scales argues, to the most toxic
mining on dry land. But the revenues could
be huge. An analysis by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology calculated that a
single seabed mine could net $1bn a year.
And an ecological case for the initiative
can be made. “I get very uncomfortable
when people describe us as deepsea min
ers,” says Gerard Barron of DeepGreen Met
als, a deepsea mining company targeting
the metals used in electriccar batteries.
“We want to help the world transition awayfrom fossil fuels.” Because the longterm
impact is unknown, Ms Scales is sceptical;
her argument is compelling, even if her ex
planation of car batteries is a slog. Yet an
other marine biologist doubts that mining
would be forestalled “even if we found uni
corns on the sea floor”.
Early European cartographers often
used sea serpents to mark uncharted
depths. Hic sunt dracones—Here be dra
gons—reads the inscription flagging an
unfathomable stretch ofwateron a globe
made in 1510. But the mostthreatening sea
monster of all may be man.n