Ben Zimmer, who never sleeps (at least not when words are in question or peril) has discovered (via the Wordsmith.org forums, where a user there, Joe Friday, gives the probable origin of the 'fish' part of the 'being hit by a fish' meaning given for cornobble.

It seems that in Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words: Gathered from Numerous and Diverse Authoritative Sources, cornobble is included, with the gloss of "hit by a fist". Then the book (or at least the part with cornobble) was put online, on various and sundry web pages, with one or more of them changing "fist" to "fish". Simple enough.

Charlie Elster was also asked about this problem by the resourceful Mr. Friday, and he figured that Mrs. Byrne had found the word in Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (soon to be online, or one hopes), where, in fact, it is. (According to that same Joe Friday, who intrepidly called his local library to ask them to look it up for him -- you'd be surprised at how happy most librarians are to do this for you, just try it and see!). In that book the meaning is given as "to beat on".

So, the question now is: knowing all this, can you still use cornobbled to mean "hit by a fish"? Well, yes. There are plenty of examples of errors or reanalyzings transmitted in English that have become more-or-less standard: apron used to a napron, and so forth. And since there is such a huge lexical gap here to be filled [whoops, Ben posted some in the comments] -- there are no other English words for hitting or being hit by a fish, as far as I know -- I think we can go ahead and keep this one.

[ETA: more fish words in comments, and picture of Lew Zealand. Because every post is improved by MUPPETS!]

Labels: errors, fish, muppets

This entry was posted by Erin, on Friday, March 02, 2007. You can leave your response.