487 GG Wolf or Woof. Interrobang. Riding Roughshod
Grammar Girl: For Writers and Language Lovers.
Mignon Fogarty, Inc.
4.5 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2015
⏱️ 10 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Grimmigirl here. I'm Minion Pogody and today I have a quick and dirty tip about wolf |
| 0:10.6 | down and wolf down. I have a meaty middle about the interrebang and a tidbit about the |
| 0:16.3 | phrase running roughshod. Let's get started. On Twitter, Daniel asked, when someone |
| 0:22.7 | has eaten something very fast, have they wolfed or woofed it down? The right choice is to |
| 0:29.6 | say people wolfed it down their food, as if they were eating like a ravenous wolf |
| 0:34.8 | in the wild. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, wolf was first used this way |
| 0:40.7 | in the book The Seven Sons of Maman in 1862, where the line reads, she used to wolf her |
| 0:47.7 | food with her fingers. To say someone wolfed down a meal is a specific kind of error called |
| 0:54.8 | an egg corn, a term that was coined in 2003 by linguists on the website language log. They |
| 1:01.8 | noticed that a woman had called an egg corn, an egg corn. On the egg corn database site, |
| 1:08.7 | they explained that what makes this something more than a misspelling is if you don't know |
| 1:13.6 | the spelling, egg corn actually makes sense because an egg corn is shaped like an egg, |
| 1:19.7 | and a kernel of corn can be a seed, just like an egg corn is a seed. Since this was the |
| 1:26.0 | first example they had seen of this kind of error, they named the class of error an egg |
| 1:31.3 | corn. Wolfed down is an egg corn because if you don't know the spelling, wolf makes sense, |
| 1:38.5 | because these days you're much more likely to see a hungry dog eating a meal than a hungry |
| 1:43.3 | wolf, and you can imagine a dog gulping down a meal as if in a single wolf. But that's |
| 1:49.7 | not the right choice. You wolf down a meal, and I remember the right spelling by thinking |
| 1:54.7 | of little red riding hood carrying her basket of food through the woods and the wolf following |
| 2:00.5 | her wanting to wolf down a meal. And that was your quick and dirty tip. When you're eating |
| 2:06.1 | in a hurry, you are wolfing down your food. And now on to the interrebang. This piece is by |
| 2:14.1 | Eric Decker's who was inspired by the mention of the interrebang in our recent episode on the |
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