Is "yay or nay" an acceptable alternative to "yea or nay"? I have seen it several times in recent weeks, enough to make me wonder whether it is an emerging usage or just a common typo.
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As a Brit, I'd never confuse "make due" and "make do", but per comments above, they are homophones for some Americans (which as John Lawler comments, could put us in deep do-due here). I still don't really understand how anyone could think "due" makes sense, but here's someone on The Eggcorn Database who says he can (I think he's not exactly a "careful thinker", but there you go).
This NGram claims 44,400 instances of "make do", and 288 of "make due"...
...but when I scroll through them it seems there are actually only 74 instances of the incorrect form. But the actual numbers are irrelevant - it's incorrect, meaningless, and unacceptable.
I absolutely loved this question. Of course, we can all think of a handful of words like thingy, that simply act as a stand-in word for the word we are thinking of but cannot, at present, grasp.
The 1960 Dictionary of American slang uses the term kadigin for placeholder words, defining it as a synonym for thingamajig.
Dr. Richard Nordquist, Professor Emeritus of English, writes in Crossing Boundaries: Studies in English Language, Literature, and Culture in a Global Environment, originally published in 2009:
The linguistic term for such peculiar sounding words as "thingamajig" and "whatchamacallit" is placeholder, or, less formally, tongue-tipper or kadigin: a word used to signal that a speaker does not know or cannot remember a more precise word for something.
William Safire, author, presidential speechwriter, and writer of The New York Time's column "On Language" addresses popular etymology in his incredibly popular, and entertaining, column. The focus of his January 9, 2005 piece, "Whosit's Whatchamacallit" is all about your topic:
"We are now into the creative world of "tongue-tippers," terms used in place of words on the tip of the speaker's tongue but just beyond linguistic reach."
In the article, Safire provides fascinating history and etymology of various tongue-tippers. We also learn that English may not be able to lay claim to all tounge-tippers:
"British English also has its words for the unremembered objects. In 1962, The Sunday Times explained that "'ujah' . . . was used as widely and as indiscriminately as 'gimmick' and 'gadget' are used now." It was usually spelled oojah and was thought to be of Hindustani origin."
I hope you enjoy reading the entirety of Safire's column. Between placeholder, kadigin and tongue-tipper, the last one in my opinion is the best. I think that it's important to have a memorable word when trying to remember the name for the group of words that we use when we just can't seem to remember the actual word.
Best Answer
The words yea and yay are homophones, meaning they are pronounced the same. Yea is a somewhat specialized word (“yes—used in oral voting”) most often used in a spoken context, so I would expect that many people would not realize there are two spellings for two different meanings.
Using the spelling yay for yea is therefore an eggcorn. Here's a discussion of it at the Eggcorn Database forum.
There were no examples of yay being used for yea at the Corpus of Contemporary American English, so it doesn't seem to be an emerging usage that is getting into the kinds of edited texts used to populate that corpus. On the other hand, there are plenty of Google results, including some on major, presumably professionally-edited sites, like ABC News and New York Magazine. Interestingly, a large portion of the top Google results were related to fashion.
How embarrassing for them: anyone who knows that there are two spellings for the two words would instantly identify yay for yea as an error.
Even the normally quite liberal and descriptivist Merriam-Webster dictionary has no entry at all for ‘yay’. Only Collins English Dictionary has an entry for yay, and it’s only for the exclamatory sense.
So, yes, it does appear that this substitution is an emerging usage, but no authorities at all countenance it just yet, and given that there is an unimpeachable substitute, I don’t recommend that anyone use it.