In his book Fine Print: Reflections on the Writing Art, columnist James J. Kilpatrick decried what was literally and figuratively a bona fide misuse: Kilpatrick expressed his dismay regarding writers who had spelled the phrase as bonified and as bonafied, as if one could bonify something—make it real (what was it before?). And therefore the object in question would now be bonified.
Bonified is clearly a mistake. But I would wager, with all due respect to the learned Mr. Kilpatrick, that he himself repeats English mistakes daily. And I can pretty much guarantee that you, my equally esteemed reader, do not go a day without promulgating one or more English goofs. You and I and Mr. Kilpatrick simply accept them these days.
As examples:
You’ve certainly eaten an apple. Oops. The doctors that are being kept away each day will be proud of you, but deep down the linguists should be appalled. You are repeating that common language “mistake,” because what you are really eating is a napple. But somewhere along the line, we mistake-ridden folk started confusing ourselves about where the N went, and darnit if we didn’t go and bonify the word apple. By mistake.
Do you have a nickname? Oops. (And eek, to boot.) You have an eke name (eke meaning “extra”), swallowed and reseparated into a nickname. And so it is with the other words we no longer use by mistake, including napron, nadder, numpire and nauger on one side of the wandering N, and otch and ewt on the other side.
These are cases of “metanalysis,” a technical coinage from 1914 describing “reanalyzing” word patterns. That’s very kind. They’re mistakes.
44 “j-jg turned me into s newt,” ssid the ewt in Monty Python und the Vcvbul Gruil. But he s getting better.
728
Bill Brohaugh
Other mistakes over the centuries result from various types of speech patterns and repatterns and, yes, even reanalyzing. You’ve eaten a caper before, yes? Here I would say oops, but since this is a single mistake, I will say oop. Capers came to English as one of those words both singular and plural, but we depluralized it by removing the S. So it was with pea (see page 148 for more on that) and, in a sense, cherry. Oop.
And then there's pure “folk etymology,” where people change syllables and sometimes entire words to syllables and words more common in their lives. A chaise lounge chair is a corruption of the original French chaise longue (literally, “chair long”); cherry is a corruption of French cherise, misinterpreted as a plural; shamefaced puts a blushing human face into the original shamefast; and so on. Each of these mistakes and corruptions have become bona fide.
What’s more, I say with more conviction than alarm, they will become bonified, as well.
Now let’s take a look at a few other words that have mistakenly earned their bonafides.