Confederacy of a Dunce - Warm spiced wine keeps the mold away

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

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Today I received an email from an organization at my university about their winter party. You'd never guess what they're serving.

"There will be hot mold WINE and sizzling MINCE PIES offered to UCL Postgraduates ALL FOR FREE!"

Now it's rather unusual to have sizzling mince pies (usually they're room temperature and perhaps a little on the stale side), but my attention was drawn to the "mold wine". It's a classic sort of eggcorn for "mulled wine". I say "classic" because an unusual/uncommon word is replaced by a more common/better known one, and the reinterpretation sort of makes sense. And there are plenty of instances of its use out there (google "mold wine" or "mould wine" and you'll find quite a few, even discounting various other contexts where the two words can occur together).

In this case, "mulled" is hardly common, especially in this particular sense; before I looked it up in the OED I hadn't ever noticed any other use besides "mulled wine". The relevant definition looks like this "To warm (wine, beer, etc.) with the addition of sugar, spices, fruit, etc., to produce a hot drink (formerly sometimes thickened with beaten egg yolk)." So it's quite a narrow definition (implying a drink not normally served warm, with sugar/spices/etc added), and not so many modern drinks fit the bill, except during the festive season when traditional drinks get a look-in. And there is the much more common word "mold" (a homophone in my dialect) waiting in the wings. "Mold wine" sort of makes sense: mold is already associated with wine (in the sense of being corked), and it's easy to see how heating and addition of spices might be a good treatment against mold.

Mulled wine also is the source of another eggcorn, "glue wine" through the German word for it: Glühwein (trans: "glowing wine", presumably related to its warmth, see also the Swedish glögg which is like Glühwein only nastier, I think). No surprise that the false friend "Glue" makes an appearance here, especially among English speakers visiting German-speaking countries (one example here).

If only it got cold enough here that mulled wine (or similar drinks) actually tasted nice...

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Tuesday, November 27, 2007 10:31:19 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)