Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From Max Vasilatos on Facebook today:

Wow how psyched am I to have new neighbors who’ve been causing a raucus for the past week.

I noted the noun raucus and speculated that it was some combination of the adjective raucous and the noun ruckus. Turns out it was an inadvertent blend, a slip of the fingers.

From NOAD2:

adj. raucous: making or constituting a disturbingly harsh and loud noise: raucous youths. ORIGIN mid 18th century: from [the stem of] Latin raucus ‘hoarse’ + –ous.

noun ruckus: a disturbance or commotion: a child is raising a ruckus in class | the current ruckus over same-sex benefits. ORIGIN  late 19th century: perhaps related to ruction and rumpus.

It seems to have been an orthographic thing, combining spelling 1 (for the A(djective) RAUCUS: R-AU-C-OUS) with spelling 2 (for the N RUCKUS: R-U-CK-US, while aiming for a N.

1-A: R – 1-AU – 1-C – 1-OUS

2-N: R – 2-U – 2- CK – 2- US

to give:

2-N: R – 1-AU – 1-C – 2-US

This entry was posted on May 3, 2017 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Blends, Errors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.