[Edited by Ben Zimmer, 5 June 06: Marked questionable, since it’s unclear whether this is categorizable as an eggcorn. It would appear to be more of a back-formation, reanalyzing offend as offen + -ed. (Compare, for instance, the word mix, a historical back-formation from mixt.)]
Spotted in the wild:
Analyzed or reported by:
Parish reported on ADS-L: “In this morning’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, there’s an AP story on Sen. Harry Reid, who accepted a questionable gift from the Nevada Athletic Commission. Kathleen Clark, an expert on congressional ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, is quoted as saying” the first cite above. Parish added: “If it’s a deliberate coinage - above being approached? - it strikes me as halfway clever, but there’s a definite eggcornish flavor to it.”
Eliminating duplicates, I found 88 Google webhits for “X above approach”, where X is a form of be. Most of them are relevant, and almost all of those look inadvertent.
“Above approach” is certainly a malaprop, with the relatively rare “reproach” replaced by the very common “approach”, but I’ve marked this one as “questionable” as an eggcorn because I’m not sure how approaching enters into the perceived meaning of the idiom, especially with reference to abstractions rather than persons. However, the last of the “above approach” cites, with its explanation that “no one can come” [i.e. approach] and question the writer’s manner of life, suggests a possible contribution. And maybe the development of “beyond approach” provides an explanation.
The “beyond approach” webhits include many like the last cite above, in which the expression seems to mean ‘beyond approaching, unapproachable, first-order’ (similar to “beyond compare” ‘beyond comparison, incomparable, first-order’), with no possible reproaching alluded to — presumably the malaprop “beyond approach” reinterpreted more or less literally. The next-to-last cite could go either way, and might represent an intermediate step on the way to literal reinterpretation.
When a ship is awash with water and unable to manoeuvre normally, it is said to founder. Perhaps because flounders are fish in the same seas as the ships, it’s almost more common to refer to a ship, today, as floundering than foundering.
In fact, in one of the references added here, flounder is actually given as a vocabulary word, erroneously defined as a boat awash in the sea.
Addendum/edit by CW, 2005/10/25: The substitution founder/flounder (in both direction) has been submitted to the Eggcorn database several times and is discussed by Paul Brians and the American Heritage Book of English Usage. It is, however, not an eggcorn. The two verbs are phonologically and semantically similar, but it is unclear that one is being reanalyzed in terms of the other. An eggcorn requires that someone has understood the sense and spelling of word they actually employ, but not the word that is conventionally used in that particular case. See also Arnold Zwicky’s discussion of flout»flaunt (also not an eggcorn).
Addendum/edit by AZ, 2005/10/26: Harsh, Chris, harsh. In fact, some people have explained to me that “flounder” is the word to use, because a ship in this sort of distress flops about like a fish — a flounder, in particular — out of water. The association with flounder (the fish) seems to be unetymological: OED2 labels it “of obscure etymology”, suggests various non-fishy sources, and gives as its earliest sense the not particularly fish-related ’stumble’ (attested from 1592). But then the sense extended to ’struggle violently and clumsily, struggle in mire’ and the way was open for comparison to a flopping flounder. (Suspiciously, several of the OED2’s citations actually mention fish.) In any case, “flounder, founder” is a great favorite of usage advisers: there’s a MWDEU entry with references to earlier writers, and most of the recent usage dictionaries have an entry — Bryson, Burchfield, Fiske, Garner, O’Conner, and Steinmann & Keller, in addition to Brians and the American Heritage folks. Of these authorities, only Steinmann & Keller (Good Grammar Made Easy, 1999, p. 140) seem to make the fish connection, but they still tell you not to use “flounder” for sinking vessels: “flounder, founder Sometimes confused. To flounder is what a fish (the flounder, for example) does out of water (move clumsily); figuratively, to be active without accomplishing anything. To founder is to sink because full of water: figuratively, to fail.”
Google stats:
“perspective students” - 118000 “prospective students” - 124000000
“perspective employer” - 12800 “prospective employer” - 1990000
If it is a reanalysis, the second occurrence quote might give a hint… prospectives looking at the position from their perspective.
Spotted in the wild:
Analyzed or reported by:
After Ken Rudolph supplied the first cite above, I googled up lots of “X magnet” ‘X tycoon’ examples, for X = shipping, newspaper, mining, textile, oil, publishing, business, real estate, liquor, automobile, fashion. Undoubtedly there are more.
There are also many occurrences of “X magnet” referring to something, someplace, or someone that attracts X. This is a possible contribution to the replacement of the rare “magnate” ‘tycoon’ by the much more common “magnet”: an X magnate is someone who attracts X business(es) to himself (or, much more rarely, herself).
Unfortunately, as Jed Davis pointed out on soc.motss on 17 October 2005, there are also hundreds of references to “magnate schools” (for “magnet schools”), which suggests that MWDEU might be right in thinking that there is just a spelling confusion here. Not (yet) in Brians, for what that’s worth. In any case, I’ve labeled it as questionable.