Misles
Up until I was in my twenties, I read mis-led as misle-d,
formed from a nonexistent verb misle. In my head, I pronounced
the first syllable like miserly (because misling someone was such
a small-minded nasty thing to do). I never noticed that I never saw the
other forms of this verb (to misle, misling, he misles), and for some
reason, I never actually said the word out loud to anyone so I never
found out that I had made up misle out of the whole cloth of my
imagination. Then one day, I read a newspaper article where
misled and mislead occurred in consecutive lines. Oh!
The misreading of misled is so common that it has given rise to
the OED entry mizzle, v.2, and the variant form misle
(with various pronunciations) rates entries in Urban Dictionary and
similar sites.
- https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=misle
- https://definition.org/define/misle/
- https://sesquiotic.com/2015/08/09/misle/
There has even been a word coined for words like misled. The
word is misle, and misled is likely the most common one.
Here is a list of misles compiled by Donna Richoux
(https://groups.google.com/g/alt.usage.english/c/SFoQ7-8L-0o, retrieved
16 Feb 2021).
Besides misled, I recall beribbone-d and infrare-d
from my childhood (the parallel with ultra-violet didn't help).
- apply (like lemony)
- baketable
- barfly
- barroom
- bassethorns
- bedraggled
- bedrock
- beribboned
- biopic
- boathouse
- bootheels
- codenamed
- codeveloper
- coworker
- deicer
- fathead
- goatherd
- infrared
- manslaughter
- menswear
- menus
- middecade
- miniseries
- misheard
- misled
- molester (like hamster)
- moped
- mothers (like butterfly-ers)
- nowhere (like then-there) - I've added this one to the list
- porthole
- potash
- pothole
- redrawing
- riverbed
- shelfreading
- sidereal
- sundried
- sundry
- therapist
- titleist
- triphammer
- tutus
- underfed
- undermined (with stress on second syllable)
- unshed
- warchest
- warplane
- watershed
The same phenomenon occurs with spoken words, where it is generally referred
to as "folk etymology".
- ideally > I dealy 'I would prefer'
- Miami > my ami vs. your ami (repoted in Algeo and Butcher,
ch. 11, p. 268)
- In current ASL, the sign for HOME is much reduced from EAT and BED.
EAT is an O handshape at the mouth (google "ASL handshapes" for
details) and BED is a B handshape at the ear. The B handshape
assimilated to the O handshape, and over time, the places of
articulation moved ever closer together, so that there is a form that
consists of two taps with the O handshapes on the cheek (midway
between mouth and ear). So as a child, Jami Fisher, our ASL
coordinator, thought that HOME was so called because it is the place
that you get kisses. (There are many different variant of KISS, but
some involve the O handshape at the cheek.)