The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

suppose. According to the First Supplement of the OED, there are at least 350 words in English dictionaries that owe their existence to typographical errors or other misrenderings. For the most part they are fairly obscure. One such is messauge, a legal term used to describe a house, its land, and buildings. It is thought to be simply a careless transcription of the French ménage.
    Many other words owe their existence to mishearings. Buttonhole was once buttonhold. Sweetheart was originally sweetard, as in dullard and dotard. Bridegroom was in Old English bryd-guma, but the context made people think of groom and an r was added. By a similar process an l found its way into belfrey. Asparagus was for 200 years called sparrow-grass. Pentice became penthouse. Shamefaced was originally shamefast ( fast here having the sense of lodged firmly, as in “stuck fast”). The process can still be seen today in the tendency among many people to turn catercorner into catty-corner and chaise longue into chaise lounge.
    Sometimes words are created by false analogy or back-formation. One example of this is the word pea. Originally the word was pease, as in the nursery rhyme “pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold.” But this was mistakenly thought to signify a plural and the word pea was back-formed to denote singularity. A similar misunderstanding gave us cherry (from cerise ). Etymologically cherries ought to be both singular and plural—and indeed it once was. The words grovel and sidle similarly came into English because the original adverbs, groveling and sideling, were assumed to contain the participle -ing, as in walking and seeing. In fact, it was the suffix -ling, but this did not stop people from adding a pair of useful verbs to the language. Other back-formations are laze (from lazy ), rove, burgle, greed (from greedy ), beg (from beggar ), and difficult (from difficulty ). Given the handiness and venerability of the process, it is curious to note that language authorities still generally squirm at the addition of new ones to the language. Among those that still attract occasional opprobrium are enthuse and donate.
    Finally, erroneous words are sometimes introduced by respected users of the language who simply make a mistake. Shakespeare thought illustrious was the opposite of lustrous and thus for a time gave it a sense that wasn’t called for. Rather more alarmingly, the poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.” But it also contains this disconcerting passage:
    Then owls and bats,
    Cowls and twats,
    Monks and nuns in a cloister’s moods,
    Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
    Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat —which meant precisely the same then as it does now—but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him.
    2. WORDS ARE ADOPTED. This is of course one of the glories of English—its willingness to take in words from abroad, rather as if they were refugees. We take words from almost anywhere— shampoo from India, chaparral from the Basques, caucus from the Algonquin Indians, ketchup from China, potato from Haiti, sofa from Arabia, boondocks from the Tagalog language of the Philippines, slogan from Gaelic. You can’t get much more eclectic than that. And we have been doing it for centuries. According to Baugh and Cable [page 227], as long ago as the sixteenth century English