Archive for the ‘Eggcorns’ Category

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Eggcorns, innocent and deliberate

August 26, 2025

From a reader on 8/24:

Are you involved in collecting eggcorns?  In case you are, I thought you might be interested in a potential one that I’ve encountered “in the wild” (i.e., a Reddit post).  This person wrote jig solve puzzles instead of jigsaw puzzles:

I should have been diagnosed [with ADHD] as a child but it was the early 90s in a poor rural area. Special ed at my school didn’t diagnose me with anything specific … they just told my mom I needed to spend time doing jig solve puzzles. So, I forced my way through. (Reddit posting)

My response:

I certainly have been involved in collecting eggcorns. But there are only so many balls you can juggle at one time, and I am now a old man with not a lot of time left, so I’ve been pretty much out of the eggcorn business. But you will be pleased to hear that jigsaw > jig solve isn’t in the eggcorn database and hasn’t come up in the eggcorn forum, so I might post on it.

And now I am.

(more…)

Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Formulaic language, Intention, Language play, Names, Play, Puns, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »

The pencilguin

August 10, 2025

Today’s Rhymes With Orange strip (by Hilary B. Price) turns on reanalysis + analogical coining, yielding a kind of pun that looks like a deliberate eggcorn — embodied in that rare and elusive creature, the pencilguin, cousin to the penguin, but very much resembling a pencil, specifically a Dixon Ticonderoga (maybe even with the HB medium soft (#2) lead American children tend to favor):


(#1) The pen of penguin is probably Welsh pen ‘head’ (the bodypart), but suppose we (mis)take it to be English pen ‘instrument for writing or drawing with ink’, a reanalysis encouraged by penguins having black bodies as dark as ink; then we can venture to create the analogical name pencilguin, for a penguin-like creature having a pencil-like body rather than a pen-like one

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Posted in Eggcorns, Furnishings and tools, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | Leave a Comment »

Words just for us to use

March 21, 2025

Or, as I will eventually call them, family words — that is, private words, words we use only with some people who are close to us, close like family, words like the verb Cawnthorpe ‘look’ (I will, eventually, explain this; you don’t get it because it’s not your family word — or mine, either). My ultimate goal in this posting is family-word material from Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett’s Way with Words newsletter this very morning, but I’m going to edge up slowly to private words through private meanings (for common words, like ritzy used to mean ‘expensively stylish’) and eggcorns (a colorful label for private forms for common words, like eggcorn for acorn ‘nut of an oak tree’).

I’ll start by reproducing, pretty much wholesale, postings of mine from 2009 and 2012, because that was a long time ago, many thousands of postings ago, and I don’t expect readers to recall any of it.

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Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Misreadings | 3 Comments »

They’re a stink

March 20, 2024

(Very much a brief MQoS Not Dead Yet posting on my part, while I cope with a complex posting on the wonders of VPE in English)

In an old One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed this morning, two of the kids — Ruthie and the neighbor boy James — undertake to go on a dinosaur hunt, expecting the creatures to be easy to find because, according to James, they’re a stink:


Ruthie’s grandfather is about to explain to James the difference between extinct and a stink

Once again, the kids are coping with unfamiliar, technical vocabulary by interpreting it, eggcornishly, as more familiar material. Something of a stretch in this case, though extinct and a stink are indeed phonologically similar. I do wonder if there have been kids who reinterpreted extinct this way, or whether Rick Detorie (the cartoonist) merely imagined a reinterpretation that might have happened. Oh, the things that might have been!

(The adjective extinct is historically a specialized variant of extinguished, so calls to mind the vivid image of these creatures having their flame of life quenched, put out.)

 

Posted in Eggcorns, Linguistics in the comics, Technical and ordinary language | 2 Comments »

Ruthie goes for the donuts

February 23, 2023

In my comics feed today, a One Big Happy originally from 1/6/03 (20 years ago, and that turns out to be important) in which Ruthie eggcorns the weatherman’s technical term windchill (factor) to Winchell’s (the name of a chain donut shop), which is more familiar to her — but not perhaps to most readers of the strip, even in 2003, when there were a lot more Winchell’s shops around than there are now. But the strip:


(#1) windchill / wind-chill / wind chill is a N + N compound meaning roughly ‘chill caused by wind’, but is in fact a technical term in metereology (and its connection to chill and wind might not be clear to someone who in passing hears tv reports mentioning the factor)

Especially the connection to wind, since pronunciations of wind chill in ordinary connected speech lack a [d].

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Posted in Eggcorns, Holidays, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Phonetics, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

The Aussie firedog

April 8, 2022

(There will be a few excursions in passing about men’s bodies and man-on-man sex. If you can manage an appearance or two of the sexual verb fuck, you’ll be ok.)

From Ann Burlingham a couple days ago, a greeting card with a photo from the 2020 Australian Firefighters calendar, showing a man and his dog:


(#1) How to read the man, how to read the dog, and how to read the relationship between them

It turns out that there’s an amazing amount of content packed into this photo — I’ll try to reveal a bit of it here — and the photo leads to much more, including andirons, Dalmatians, lexicography, and the cartoonist George Booth.

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Posted in Cartoonists, Eggcorns, Facial expression and gesture, Gay porn, Gaze, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and the body, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Metaphor | 3 Comments »

From the annals of resistible offers

November 13, 2021

In yesterday’s mailbox, this indirect attempt to get me to post (about) something on this blog (untouched except for suppressing its header and the link):

With all do the respect,

I am hitting your inbox without any introduction, sorry for that.

BUT…. we did put around 230+ hours into this article about the most popular dog breeds in the world. (scanned 96 countries)

So check it:

[link]

What you think?

Paws UP or Down?

(more…)

Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Formulaic expressions, Politeness, Pragmatics, This blogging life, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Twirly and girly

August 3, 2021

The One Big Happy from 6/5, in which Ruthie struggles, eggcornishly, to rationalize an unfamiliar name with familiar parts:

Mary, Susan, whatever.

Meanwhile, I now have “Honey Bun” from South Pacific in my head:

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Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Phonetics, Poetic form, Variation | 4 Comments »

Iscariot

October 23, 2019

In the 9/26 One Big Happy, Ruthie and Joe cope eggcornishly with the biblical name Iscariot (as in Judas Iscariot), attempting (as they so often do, quite reasonably) to make some sense of an unfamiliar and opaque name:

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Posted in Dialects, Eggcorns, Linguistics in the comics, Phonology | Leave a Comment »

Nudie tales

July 8, 2019

The One Big Happy from 6/11 (in my comics feed today), in which Ruthie mishears a stock expression from tv news reporting:


Said: new details. Heard: nudie tales.

The stock expression is new details (sometimes more details, occasionally just details), frequently at 11 (because 11 p.m. is the conventional time for the late evening news in the US), but other times are of course possible (e.g. at 6), as are continuations like soon, later, and coming.

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Posted in Eggcorns, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics, Mishearings, Phonetics, Stock expressions | Leave a Comment »

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