Archive for the ‘Eggcorns’ Category
May 31, 2012
In a Facebook comment on my latest mishearing posting, Billy Green offered an example that is surely not a mishearing, but might be an eggcorn or a lexical confusion: sum up for summon up. Billy’s example:
Today, I finally summed up the courage to break up with my abusively controlling girlfriend. I don’t know what I was thinking, but instead of leaving as a free man, I left as an engaged one. (link)
Not in the ecdb, but it came up on the Eggcorn Forum in 2007. And the reverse subtitution, summon up for sum up, came up there in 2010. Commenters characterized the first as an eggcorn, but the semantic relationship is unclear.
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Posted in Eggcorns, Errors | 2 Comments »
May 29, 2012
Yesterday Wilson Gray reported on ADS-L that he’d come across “went a might too far” on another mailing list, in a context where he would have expected the degree modifier a mite ‘a bit, a tad, a little’. Possibly just a spelling confusion (with the more frequent item might standing in for the less frequent mite) — might – mite does appear on many lists of homophones and spelling confusions — but something more complex might be going on, at least for some of the occurrences.
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Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Semantics, Spelling | 1 Comment »
May 19, 2012
In the account of the band Here We Go’s encounter with John Waters, here, we find:
But the truth is we actually picked him up hitchhiking. It was a complete and utter coincident.
with coincident for coincidence. This is far from an isolated example, so we have to conclude that this is a reanalysis, perhaps an eggcornish one based on the existing word coincident and encouraged by the possibility of final cluster simplification in English (in this case, the simplification of final [ts] to [t]).
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Posted in Eggcorns, Language change, Morphology, Phonology | 4 Comments »
April 26, 2012
Yesterday on ADS-L, Amy West reported
a sign by the front door of a triple-decker house in our neighborhood that says
Do not throw cigarette nuts on the ground.
Amy thought that cigarette nuts was an eggcorn — not previously reported, as it turns out — for cigarette butts. But things might be more complex than that.
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Posted in Eggcorns, Variation | Leave a Comment »
January 21, 2012
From Tim Wilson on Facebook, a link to this piece by John Swansburg on Slate yesterday:
Stealth Mountain (@StealthMountain) is a Twitter bot with a single, simple purpose: It searches for tweets in which a person has typed the words “sneak peak” when they meant to type “sneak peek,” then publishes a reply informing the author of his error. The account went live in November, and as of this morning has issued 16,900 such corrections.
… Many recipients of @StealthMountain’s tweets do not appreciate being scolded, even gently. The owner of Stealth Mountain stars the nastiest responses, which allows the visitor to his Favorites page to see for himself the thanklessness [you might say quixotism] of this work, and to be reminded of the delightfully varied surliness of the Twitterverse.
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Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Spelling | 3 Comments »
October 25, 2011
On ADS-L on the 23rd, Victor Steinbok reported this find, in a comment on a TPM posting of an interview with Rick Perry about birtherism:
Was that a verbatim transcript? What’s up with his one syllabus (or close) answers? Is that how he interviews — like pulling teeth?
At first this looks like some kind of malapropism — presumably a Fay/Cutler malapropism (an inadvertent phonologically based error in word retrieval). But something more interesting might be going on.
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Posted in Eggcorns, Errors | Leave a Comment »
August 30, 2011
On the eggcorn beat. It started with:
Patrick Bubley is the soul-surviving son of Maeve Bubley. His brothers (Vaughn, Cedric, Quincy and Luther) were all killed (link)
(which came up while I was searching for something completely different). Soul for sole.
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Posted in Eggcorns | 6 Comments »
August 25, 2011
… caught on the radio as I was going to sleep several days ago. Didn’t record the source, but you can google up large numbers of this expanded version of the predicative idiom few and far between — and also a respectable number of the truncated version few and far ‘few and far between/apart/away’. The expanded version looks like it originated, eggcornishly, as an attempt to make more sense of the standard idiom (by incorporating the idiom in between in it), and the truncated version looks like a nonce truncation that might be spreading on its own.
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Posted in Eggcorns, Idioms, Language play, Nonsense, Poetry, Truncation | 1 Comment »
April 11, 2011
First, on the Eggcorn Database, a new entry for the eggcorn disingenuine (for disingenuous), which has the flavor of a portmanteau of disingenuous and genuine.
Then, a few days ago a friend reported in conversation:
I page-turned for [an organist] several times
This is a two-part back-formed verb, based on the synthetic compound page-turner ‘someone who turns pages for a musician’.
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Posted in Back formation, Eggcorns, Portmanteaus, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »
March 20, 2011
Sighted on University Avenue in Palo Alto yesterday morning, this notice in the window of a Vietnamese restaurant:
(Photo — complete with some reflected street trees — by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)
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Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Spelling | 3 Comments »