Spifflicate him again, Hat; he's still moving.

Sad to say, you have a point.

It would seem necessary to specify that the word is always pejorative. You would not speak of the arrant perfection of a Mozart piano concerto, for example.

I'm not a linguist (and I don't even play one on the internet), but I'm sure there's a term for a word that enters the spoken language twice: first as it was actually pronounced, and then as it is spelled.

I'm wondering if "arrant" and "errant" aren't (eren't?) an example of this. To "err" originally had a meaning (from the French, and thus presumably from the Latin) of "to wander" or "to travel". So, a knight errant was simply a traveling knight.

At some point the meaning came to include the idea of wandering or straying from the correct path, and then to include the idea of moral lapse -- the sense we find in the phrase "arrant knave".

Here's the kicker: I wonder if these aren't exactly the same word? In some words the Brits pronounce written "er" as "ar" (or is it that they spell spoken "ar" as "er"?): "clark/clerk", "Barclay/Berkeley". The "Barbary Coast" is where the "Berbers" live.

Is it possible that the word originally spelled "errant" (taken over from the French) was commonly pronounced "arrant" (cf Henri/Harry), then re-entered the written language spelled as it was pronounced ("arrant knave", "knight arrant")? Then re-entered the spoken language pronounced as it was spelled ("knight errant")?

Help me out, linguistic historians!

Berberian, the change you describe is called a pronunciation spelling, and that does seem to be roughly what occurred: an alternation in pronunciation was matched by an alternation in orthography. The OED etymology for arrant says "For the vowel-change cf. arrand= errand, Harry=Herry, Henry, FAR=earlier fer, etc."

Oh, and Tensor, if your read Safire's column you'll see he does make mention of relative Googlecounts. (Not that I trust those very much, but in this case they seem to be reliable indicators of collocational frequency.

Oh, for the love of Mike. I keep promising myself I'm not going to assume things, and then I go and make an ass out of...well, me, at least. Hey, Hat, any chance you could delete my comment so I don't look like a fool for all neternity?

Sure thing!

I ran Safire's article through MS-Word's spelling and grammar checker for amusement with some interesting results:

Safire / Microsoft
supermaven / super maven
The Times's / The Time's
errant's / errand's
errants / errands
its meaning / it's meaning

Word apparently doesn't like errant as a noun. It didn't flag arrant at all for anything. Both Safire and Word confuse me on the posssessive of "The Times". I would have thought it was The Times' without the second s. And finally, Word is just plain wrong on its vs. it's.

And from the Encarta (UK version) dictionary:

"arrant adj. used to emphasize that somebody or something is an extreme example of something disapproved of [Mid-16th century. Alteration of ERRANT 'wandering'; from its frequent application to roving vagabonds]." I'm dubious of the last part but the meaning is clear.

Word's spell check is as bad as WIndows software.

I like "arrant" because I think it recalls, if only visually and aurally, the word "arrogant" -- which, in my experience, the spouters of arrant nonsense often are.

Hey this just occurred to me: Don Quixote could be described as a "knight arrant"!