My posting on holiday Cake Wrecks failed to catch this excellent eggcorn in one of the comments on the Cake Wrecks site:
The “Santa Clause” one is not really a missed spelling.
That is, missed spelling for mis-spelling / misspelling. (Hat tips to Ann Burlingham and Amanda Walker.)
It’s not in the Eggcorn Database (even in the comments section), but it seems to be moderately common.
Googling on {“a missed spelling word”} pulls up some irrelevant stuff, like “a missed spelling word” (a spelling word — that is, a word on a spelling test — that is missed — that is, spelled incorrectly) and “a missed spelling test” (a spelling test that someone fails to take). But there are plenty of relevant hits, for example:
It [“Clauween”] could be a missed spelling. There is a Claureen in Co, Clare and also a Claureen in Co, Galway. (link)
After all, fixing a missed spelling on a comment is different from tackling vicious comments. (link)
Oh and i can’t belive the spell check on this works as it is yet to find a missed spelling. (link)
A missed spelling of a word may butcher a person’s credentials as a journalist. (link)
And yes, there are also hits for missed pronunciation.
December 29, 2008 at 12:12 am |
It’s a hypercorrection from someone who prefers iced tea and barbed wire to ice tea and barb wire.
Do we need a new term for hypercorrection-eggcorns? Thought not.
December 29, 2008 at 12:50 am |
To mollymooly: labeling something as a “hypercorrection” imputes a motive to the person who produced it — in this case, to all the people who produced this expression. I think this is gratuitous, and indefensible. It might be the source of some of these errors, but I can’t believe it’s what’s going on in all of them.
But I might be misunderstanding your point. “Iced tea” and “barbed wire” are the historical originals, though “ice tea” and “barb wire” are now very common. But “iced tea” and “barbed wire” are in no way hypercorrections. These days, the two versions are just variants, used by different people.
December 29, 2008 at 1:17 pm |
What I mean is this: someone who is aware of the ice-tea/iced-tea variations might regard the versions with -ed as the original or more sophisticated version, prefer them on that basis, and affect to use any such version.
If such a person believes in the existence of a miss-spelling/missed-spelling variation, they will use “missed spelling”. Google shows a fair number of hits for “miss spelling”, which would be the pure eggcorn; “missed spelling” is then eggcorn plus something else, which I called a hypercorrection. Maybe that is not the correct term.
I should not suggest that all instances of the error were produced in this way.