The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Marked “questionable” because potentially the product of a simple typo (typing one “t” instead of two). On the other hand, _kick but_ and its variants is apparently not uncommon.

Note that _butt naked_ itself counts as a (”nearly mainstream”) eggcorn. See also _nip in the butt_.

Siemon came across “Seeing my face run the gamete from shock to anger…” in soft-core porn of a pretentiously “literary” variety, then Googled and came across a surprisingly large corpus. A web search on 10 September 2005 pulled up ca. 227 pages for “run”, 323 for “runs”, 57 for “running”, and 82 for “ran”. With as yet no access to people who use the spelling GAMETE, I’ve marked this one as questionable: how do people pronounce GAMETE in this context, and do they think there’s some connection to reproductive cells?

In non-technical English, the word “gamut” is pretty much restricted to this one idiom, and most people don’t know about its etymological connection to musical scales, so it’s open to reshaping. In any case, the spelling GAMUT, with its single M and with U representing schwa, is odd, so you’d expect spelling errors, and in fact misspellings of “gamut” are fairly frequent. Here are some Google web figures for “run the ___” (as of 10 September 2005):

Vowel U preserved:

gamut (correct spelling) over a million
gammut 682
gamutt 22
gamute 27
gammute 0

Vowel E:

gamet 3,100
gammet 1,740
gamett 1
gamete 227 (as above)
gammete 0

Vowel I:

gamit 783
gammit 1,090
gamitt 0
gamite 0
gammite 0

Vowel O:

gamot 860
gammot 677
gamott 1
gamote 0
gammote 0

Vowel A:

gamat 63
gammat 70
gamatt 0
gamate 2
gammate 9

There are two clear tendencies in the misspellings: to double the M; and to use the vowel E preferentially, I or O less preferentially, A or U least preferentially. The moderately frequent misspelling GAMETE doesn’t double the M but does use the vowel E. However, it also has a final E, which is otherwise a rare feature of the misspellings; note that GAMMETE gets no hits. I suggest that these facts indicate that writers recognize that GAMETE is the spelling for a word of English — the other misspellings are not standard spellings of English words — which is then available (despite its own oddities of spelling) for the idiom “run the ___” ‘cover a complete range or extent’.

Which is only to argue that GAMETE can be expected as an occasional misspelling of “gamut”. It doesn’t attain eggcorn status unless we can show that there are some speakers who think that the word “gamete” is somehow involved in the idiom.

See also run the gambit.

A Google web search on “Catillac” yields thousands of examples, most of them irrelevant: Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats (television show of the 80s), other bits of cat-related word play, the Catillac variety of pear, horses named Catillac, people who’ve chosen “catillac” as their username, and so on. Of the remaining examples, some are probably just misspellings, as in the case of the writer (above) who produces both “Cadillac” and “Catillac” in a short description, and also spells “eccentric” as “escentric” (which probably reflects an actual pronunciation). But I suspect that some of the examples arise from an association between Cadillac cars and men who might be referred to either as “cool cats” or as “fat cats”. The t/d confusion stems, of course, from intervocalic flapping in some English dialects.

See also Cadillac converter.

Not a rare spelling for “ratify”: raw Google web hits on 29 August 2005:

radification: 1,070
radified: 13,400 (most related to “rad” rather than “ratify”)
radify: 649
radifies: 89
radifying: 82

Most of these are probably simple misspellings, but “rad(ical)” might have contributed to some of them, which would bring them into eggcorn territory.

The formula “X’s lips are sealed”, used to convey ‘X will not divulge anything’, isn’t hard to work out, but it seems that at least a few people (so far I have only the two cites above) find it opaque and have improved it via the intrusion of the verb “steel” ‘make hard, obdurate’ (or perhaps the noun “steel”, evoking the image of sealing one’s lips with a steel zipper). An intermediate step might be provided by occurrences of the verb “steel” with “lips” as its object, as in these two examples supplied by Chris Waigl:

Naked at Mulder’s feet again. I could really, really get used to this.
But not tonight, dammit. I steeled my lips in a hard line and stood up,
making a Herculean effort not to look at the beautiful, hard, straining
cock right in front of me. (link)

Steeling his lips in a grimace of grim determination, Michael made his
way stoically towards the one place that Nikita could be. (link)