These Common Words Are the Result of a Hilarious Misunderstanding

I’m calling them “Splittybits.” Arrest me if you want to.

I read somewhere that a good way to get more subscribers for your newsletter is to start a beef with someone who’s more established in the same field, so I’d like to open this one by firing off a few potshots at the 19th century Danish linguist Jens Otto Harry Jespersen. I hope one of the hospitals in the Central Jutland Region of Denmark has a top-shelf Burn Center, Otto, because you’re about to get scorched. 

My primary gripe with Jespersen has to do with his habit of coining fancy words for the linguistic phenomena he unearthed, such as prosiopesis, for the tendency to omit the first sound in a word or phrase, as in “’Morning” for “Good Morning.” It’s thanks to old Otto that we’re stuck with the blisteringly dull word metanalysis for the extremely fun process that gives us real-ass words out of hilarious misunderstandings. As Otto puts it (in “A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles”):

I have ventured to coin the word ‘metanalysis’ for the phenomenon frequent in all languages that words or word-groups are by a new generation analyzed differently from the analysis of a former age. Each child has to find out for himself in hearing the connected speech of other people, where one word ends, and the next one begins, or what belongs to the kernel and what to the ending of a word, etc. In most cases he will arrive at the same analysis as the former generation, but now and then he will put the boundaries in another place than formerly, and the new analysis may become general.

Slang (1775), by Jean Bernard (Rijksmuseum)

The most well-known form of metanalysis happens when people naturally split a pair of words in the wrong place, as when we invented the apron out of whole cloth (as it were) due to a mishearing of “a napron” as “an apron.” (“Napron” is from the same Old French word that gives us “napkin.”) The word umpire comes from a similar misconstrual — hearing “an umpire” instead of “a nompere” (formed from “non” and “par” and meaning “not even,” i.e., a third, “odd,” party to judge a match between two competitors). This is also how we get “adder,” which was originally “nadder” (a Germanic word for a snake) and “auger” (the carpentry tool), a mishearing of “a nauger,” which is related to the word navel (as in belly button) in a fairly interesting way that I will just link to because I’m starting to worry that this sentence might collapse under its own weight. 

Auger (1938), by Alfonso Moreno

A slightly more complex metanalysis has given us the phrase “Eating humble pie,” which began life as a misunderstanding of “a numble” as “an umble” and then acquired a parasite “h” by mistaken association with the existing “humble” (which was at the time pronounced without it). Numbles (and later, umbles) — from the same root that gives us “loin” and “lumbar” (as in “lumbar region”) — was a word meaning “offal.” Apart from the coincidence of sound, it has no relation at all to “humble,” which comes from a root meaning “earth” that gives us all sorts of interesting words including “human” (an earthling) “chameleon” (an “earth lion”) and “bridegroom” (thanks to another hilarious misunderstanding). 

But so anyway, “eating humble pie” — aka, begging for forgiveness — is only actually humbling in the sense that one could imagine eating much more self-aggrandizing pies than the ones that are filled with minced entrails, though I’ve found that this is rather an unpopular fact to raise mid-apology, as it were. 

Speaking of apologies, we all owe one to our friend the eft, whom we’ve all been calling “a newt” instead of “an eft” (or “an eute”) since the middle of the 15th century, which is such a long time to have been calling someone by the wrong name that even the folks at Starbucks would be impressed. 

And speaking of names, “nickname” comes to us via a mishearing of “an eke-name.” (“Eke” is a Middle English word meaning “also,” which must have led to a good deal of confusion any time a Medieval cleaning lady was surprised by a mouse.) 

Two Lizards (1575–1580), by Joris Hoefnagel (The National Gallery of Art)

Not all metanalysis is a result of confounding “a” with “an” (or vice versa) — we have a similar process to thank for “surround,” which acquired its second “r” due to a false association with “round,” though its real origin is in the French word sur-onder (“to flow over,” from the Latin super (“over”) + undare “to flow,” which also gives us “undulate” and “inundate”). “Pea” is a singular falsely derived from “pease,” which was both singular and plural; and “cherry” is another false singular that owes its existence to a misunderstanding of the French “cerise” as a plural. And there are plenty more! “Notch,” “ingot,” “omelet,” “aught,” and (scandalously) “orange” all owe their origins to a form of metanalysis. 

Otto Jespersen in 1915, completely oblivious to the hurtin’ that’s coming his way

But all of this is beside the point — which is to give old J. Otto Jespersen such a spectacular bollocking that he chucks his Liddell-Scott and his Cassel’s in the Gudenå and gives up the language game for good! Others have tried to make up for the extraordinary botch-up job Otto did when he came up with the world-beatingly bland “metanalysis,” but they haven’t done much better: calling these marvelous mishaps “faulty separations,” “misdivisions, “juncture losses,” or “rebracketings” is hardly an improvement. 

I’m open to bold suggestions here, but I think I’ve narrowed it down to seven (if I may say so) excellent choices: Nipnames, Pare Words, Choppelations, Phoney-mes, Dicey-slicies, Whoopsie-groups, and my current favorite, Splittybits. I shall await the new, revised, and dramatically improved edition of  “A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles” with bated breath.