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Quash

Step on it.

Dear Word Detective:  Knowing how obsessively I await your columns, my friend got me a word-of-the-day calendar.  Last Friday’s word was “quash,” in the legal sense.  According to them it is a word derived from a Middle French word meaning “to annul” (they don’t actually say the French word).  Also it is mentioned that this is an entirely different word from the “quash,” meaning “to smash,” which comes from a Middle English word which means “to suppress or extinguish.”  Considering how similar the meanings of all four words are, I was wondering if perhaps there was an older connection between the two dating to pre-Middle English or French? — Diana T.

“Quash” is an interesting word, or words, as the case may be, especially if we redefine “interesting” to encompass “infuriating.”  The two sorts of “quash” mentioned by your calendar  are indeed “different words” in that they have different histories, but those histories are themselves entangled to such an extent that some dictionaries (the Oxford English Dictionary among them) regard both “quashes” as the same word.  It’s probably most accurate to describe the two kinds of “quash” as twins who were raised in different families, but the families lived next door to each other.  (Does anyone else smell a sitcom in that sentence?)

Using that metaphor, the parent, or perhaps grandparent, of both our littles “quashes” was the Medieval Latin verb “quassare,” which means “to shatter,” and is a derivative of “quatere,” meaning “to shake” (which gave us “concussion,” “percussion,” and other words).  This produced various forms in Middle French such as “quasser.”
This lineage produced the oldest sense of “quash” in English, first appearing in the 13th century, with the literal meaning of “to crush or destroy something physically” or “to break  something into pieces.”   Figuratively, this “quash” meant “to put down, stifle or subdue” something, and used today in everything from political news (where rebellions are often “quashed”) to sports coverage.

The other sort of “quash,” a legal term meaning “to annul, to make void; to reject as invalid” (“The court quashed the subpoena”) has the same source, but took a slight detour in Medieval Latin.  In addition to “quassare” (“to shatter”), there was “cassare,” which meant “to destroy,” derived from the Latin adjective “cassus,” meaning “empty.”  Making the situation even more confusing was the fact that “cassare” was sometimes spelled “quassare,” giving folks two different words, very close in meaning, that were spelled identically.  The legal “annul” sense of “quash” is thought either to come from, or to have been heavily influenced by this second “quassare.”  So you could argue that these are two different words, but in practical terms they have become one.
On a lighter, far less complicated note, this whole tangle also gave us the English word “squash” in the sense “to smash or crush” (and eventually the game “squash,” the name of which originally referred to the soft rubber ball).  “Squash,” the vegetable, is completely unrelated to any of this, and takes its name from the Algonquian Indian word “askutasquash.”

Mondegreen vs. Eggcorn

The ants are my friends.

Dear Word Detective:  What is the difference between “eggcorn” and “mondegreen”?  I searched the archives and see that you discussed “mondegreen” in 1997 using the same examples as were used recently to define “eggcorn.”  Are they synonymous?  If so, I must say I will continue to use “mondegreen” on the rare occasion that I need it. It sounds so much more impressive. — Krista.

That’s a great question.  You’re right, of course.  There’s a definite overlap in my explanations of “eggcorn” and “mondegreen.”  And I agree that “mondegreen” is the more impressive term, especially since the story behind it is fun to tell.  But the short answer to your question is that no, mondegreens and eggcorns are not quite the same thing.  The longer answer is, as usual, longer, and requires a bit of recapping for the folks who, at this point, are wondering what the heck we’re talking about.

A “mondegreen” is a mishearing of a popular song lyric, motto, poem or the like.  The classic (and probably apocryphal) example is the small child who calls her ragged teddy bear “Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear” because she has heard the hymn “Gladly the Cross I’d Bear.”   A more recent example is the John Fogerty song “Bad Moon Rising,” one line of which (“There’s a bad moon on the rise”) has been misheard by listeners so often over the years as “There’s a bathroom on the right” that Fogerty has taken to puckishly including the “bathroom” line in his performances of the song.

The term “mondegreen” for this sort of thing was coined by the writer Sylvia Wright in a 1954 article in Harper’s magazine.  As a child, Wright had heard the Scottish ballad “The Bonnie Earl of Murray,” which included the line “They hae slay the Earl of Murray, And Lady Mondegreen,” and she was very sad about the death of the brave Earl and his lovely Lady.  Years later, she learned that the line actually ended “… and laid him on the green.”  So she lost Lady Mondegreen, but we gained a good term for such bizarre mishearings of lyrics and poems.

An “eggcorn” is a mishearing or mutation that actually makes sense, or at least some sense, and so tends to spread from person to person.  The use of “coming down the pipe” (rather than “down the pike”), for example, is common on the internet because few people today know what a “pike” (short for “turnpike,” i.e., a toll road) is, and “pipe” makes a certain amount of sense.  Eggcorns (named by linguist Geoffrey Pullum in 2003 after the a similar substitution of “eggcorn” for “acorn”) actually seem to be increasing in number, possibly because people writing on the web are using words and phrases they’ve heard, but have never seen in print.  “Pot marks” (rather than “pock marks”), for example, is fairly common on the web, and makes so much sense to people who have never encountered “pock” or “pox” (after all, they do resemble little potholes in your skin), that “pot mark” may eventually become  the standard form.

So I’d say that the difference between a mondegreen and an eggcorn is that a mondegreen is a mishearing, specifically of a song lyric or poem, that is usually restricted to one person at a time and doesn’t spread far (if at all) before being corrected.  An “eggcorn” is a substitution of the familiar (e.g., “upmost”) for the unfamiliar (“utmost”) that is close enough in meaning to the original to spread widely.

White Shoe Firm

Like powdered wigs for feet.

Dear Word Detective:  What is the origin of “white shoe” when referring to a highly regarded, conservative law firm? — Robert Daroff.

That’s an interesting question, and this is an interesting time to be asking it.  Strictly speaking, the term “white shoe” is applied today not only to large law firms such as Cravath, Swain & Moore, but also to large investment banks and securities firms (e.g., Goldman Sachs), and even management consulting companies such as McKinsey & Co.  The term dates to the 1950s in the US, and originally denoted large, well-established New York City firms generally considered to be the province of the “WASP” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elite of the day.

In the 1970s the category of “white shoe” expanded in practice to include firms that decidedly did not fit the “old money WASP” mold, and today the term is more a measure of solidity and success than social pedigree.  Then again, with both investment banks and high-flying law firms now shedding jobs like a sheepdog in August, “white shoe” may soon join such terms as “unsinkable” and “safe as houses” in history’s attic trove of defunct linguistic antiquities.

The question, of course, is what “white shoes” could possibly have to do with membership in America’s corporate aristocracy.  For most of us, the phrase “white shoes” induces a flashback to the dorky fashions of the 1970s, when pastel leisure suits were, in certain demographics, frequently accented with white footwear.  (With the addition of a matching white belt, the resulting ensemble was known sardonically as “the full Cleveland”).

In the 1950s and early 1960s, however, there was another sort of “white shoe,” a type of suede oxford that was also known as the “white buck.”  I actually owned a pair of white bucks when I was in junior high, and before every wearing you had to clean them up with a special white powder applied, I kid you not, with a large powder puff.  I think I wore mine a total of three times.

But these shoes were considered cool at the time among Ivy League college students, especially at Yale, and especially among the “in” crowd at Yale.  As a matter of fact, the color of one’s shoes, actual or perceived, was a serious marker of social status at Yale in this period.  A few years ago, etymologist Barry Popik uncovered an Esquire magazine article from 1953 in which the reporter explained the symbolic hierarchy of footwear:

“At Yale there is a system for pigeonholing the members of the college community which is based on the word ‘shoe.”  ‘Shoe’ bears some relation to the word ‘chic,’ and when you say that a fellow is ‘terribly shoe’ you mean that he is a crumb in the upper social crust of the college…. The term derives, as you probably know, from the dirty white bucks which are the standard collegiate footwear. … It encompasses the entire community under the terms White Shoe, Brown Shoe, and Black Shoe.”

So the “White Shoes” were the upper crust at Yale (and probably other Ivy League schools), the WASP elite that later landed on autopilot at Daddy’s Wall Street firm.  One suspects that the term “white shoe firm” might have been coined by a resentful Brown or Black Shoe, but it’s equally possible that some cocky Yalie White Shoes popularized the term.  Theirs is not, after all, a social group prone to humility.