Manner or Manor

kw: language, usage, homonyms

I have occasionally commented on misuse of homonyms. For many years the most frequent misspelling in print was the use of hoard when horde was meant. In a plug for a new store, a news article might mention that it was visited by "hoards of shoppers".

Lately a new one has cropped up. Shakespeare's Hamlet is probably the origin of the phrase "to the manner born", which means that Hamlet understands a local custom because he was born and raised there. "The manner" in this case can refer to any locality or ethnicity. Much later, "to the manor born" appeared, and has more recently become the title of a popular British TV series. This refers specifically to being born rich.

Consider: "She well knew the ravages of poverty, being to the manor born." This is clearly an error, for the other phrase is meant, and it counts as a misspelling. But this: "The games they played, the powers they wielded, were second nature to him. He was to the manner born." This could go either way. The writer may really mean manor in this instance, but the phrase is not used improperly. The one encompasses the other.

A "search-poll" turns up some interesting statistics. I Googled both phrases, then repeated the searches in the Google Books page (the quotes were part of the search strings):

• "to the manner born" in Google – 430,000
• "to the manor born" in Google – 98,000 (all top hits refer to the TV show)
• "to the manner born" in Google Books – 50,000 (many advice books)
• "to the manor born" in Google Books – 16,000 (many relate to the TV show)

[Searches were performed late 10/20/2010; the figures will likely change daily but stay in these relative proportions.]

For a list of hundreds of sets of homonyms (AKA homophones), see Alan Cooper's Homonym List, to which I contributed a few hundred examples some years ago.