Passed on by a friend, who got it from the friend who came across it, the written sentence:
As I persevered and mustarded up all my energies, my creativity flowed and I was able to improve our sessions.
The story starts with the eggcorn pass mustard for pass muster, in the eggcorn database here. A comment on this entry has mustard as a verb, in “to mustard up some sort of compassion”; there are a fair number of googolable examples, for instance:
Looking back you will see that it was not your talents that kept you from your dreams, it was your inability to mustard the courage, at all cost, to make them come true. (link)
That’s stage 2, mustard as a verb.
[A development in a different direction: mustard for mustered. A contribution to the eggcorn forum notes that you can find plenty of examples of this one, for instance:
Dad would have liked it. I even mustard the courage to speak to those present, with a little help for a prop, one of my dad’s trademark hats on my head! (link)]
Once we have mustard as a verb, the way is open for stage 3, conjugating it, as in the use of mustarded in the quote above, and in a few other examples you can google up, for instance:
Despite having at least 2 love interests in her lifetime, Sylvia has never mustarded the courage for sex. She’s actually quite afraid of intimacy. (link)
January 16, 2010 at 3:13 am |
Before someone brings it up…
There is also a verb mustard ‘to put/get mustard on’ (a verbing of the noun), as in “Oh hell, I’ve mustarded my shirt” and “I think you’ll want to mustard that pastrami sandwich”. This is irrelevant to the eggcorned verb in my posting.