Cadillac » Catillac

Classification: English – questionable – /t/-flapping

Spotted in the wild:

  • “:rolleyes: now, WHO drives a catillac out of gas on a side road?? :rolleyes: anyhoo ~ i believe they were casing our house. from the road, you couldnt tell …” (link)
  • “Cadillac ‘Pink’ One of the most escentric and outrageous cars within our entire fleet, the famous 1959 Pink Catillac.” (link)
  • “Vincent then heads to boost a Catillac, but unbeknownst to him, … Vincent, speechless, jumps in the Catillac but is immediately stopped by Julius, …” (link)
  • “CUT TO Lowell speeding up and down the street of a gated off community in his pink Catillac, narrowly missing a few kids that are busy playing hop-scotch. …” (link)

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.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/09/03 |

ratify » radify

Classification: English – questionable – /t/-flapping

Spotted in the wild:

  • “I think it’s due to the new constitution radification that is about to happen.” (e-mail from a soldier correspondent in Iraq, reported by Rudolph)
  • “The Finance Committee would request that the board radify their action. … Ben Click moved and Ray Hanna seconded the motion to radify the action of the …” (link)
  • “Then and only then will the membership VOTE to radify or not radify the TENTATIVE AGEEMENT.” (link)
  • “… and works to ascertain God’s leading as to whom should fill certain positions within our congregation, the full congregation radifies these appointments in …” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Ken Rudolph (Usenet newsgroup soc.motss, 27 August 2005)

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.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/08/30 |

coded » coated

Chiefly in:   color-coated

Variant(s):  colour-coated

Classification: English – /t/-flapping

Spotted in the wild:

  • The key maps are colour-coated depending on which party won the ridings shown on the map. (Wikipedia, Canadian federal election, 2004 map gallery, revision as of 07:44, 9 October 2004)
  • Also it’s color coated so the colors change to match the channel it’s sending audio out of. (electronic music, ad, May 12 2005)
  • Color Coated Inputs (The mobilevideo Store)
  • Color Coated Cutting Boards
    These color coated cutting boards leave no question as to which board is in use and what possible contamination hazards might be present with that particular food item. (link)

The existence of color-coding - assigning meanings to colors - and color-coating - coating things (paper, metal, etc.) with a coat of color - seems to have led to some confusion about which is which. In some of the above examples, both phrases appear as if interchangeable. After all, if something is color coded, it must be coated with a color, right? Not if it’s not a color coating (which seems to be more of an industrial term) but, say, an item dyed that color.

| Comments Off link | entered by Ann Burlingham, 2005/08/25 |

Adam » atom

Chiefly in:   know so. from atom

Classification: English – /t/-flapping – proper names – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • Gee, look, assholes, the world’s now a different place and your situation has so much improved b/c you killed defenseless citizens that didn’t know you from atom and have no bearing on whatever bullshit persecutions you feel you’ve faced. (filmrot.com, comment, July 7, 2005)
  • Or you don’t know me from atom and you’ve only just discovered my blog today, but you are impressed with how utterly confident I sound in propounding my hypothesis, so you figure I must be right and you start telling everybody you meet that they should read “The Thinking Toolbox” because it is the best book ever written on the subject. (Christian Logic.com Catalog)
  • Eminem had a track, which was dope. But they shaped the sound of that record and fucked the game up. Now here comes a ni99a like me comes along. He don’t know me from atom, man. (Interview with 9th Wonder, October 30, 2003)
  • Someone who talks shit about me and faces me afterwards gains respect from me even if I don’t like what they have to say. While someone who hides behind the scenes and doesn’t know me from atom but talks shit about me just makes me wonder if they need to get a life. (Les Femmes Cafe, guestbook entry)
  • Don’t know you from atom. I have no problem with you. (alt.sys.pc-clone.packardbell, Nov 9, 1998)

I had the idea of searching for this eggcorn when I heard a speaker from Scotland talk about people who “don’t know him from Adam” (presumably) with a pronunciation that sounded like _atom_.

Arnold Zwicky pointed out in e-mail that this is also a potential case of a /t/-flapping substitution, which is typical for American English.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/08/06 |

metal » medal

Chiefly in:   pedal to the medal

Classification: English – /t/-flapping – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • Yet it’s so pedal-to-the-medal for most of its runtime that it’s hard not to get caught up in the swirling adrenaline. (UCLA Daily Bruin, Nov. 1, 1996)
  • Pedal to the medal, 90 mph, “I can’t hold her together much longer, captain” bluegrass. (Univ. of Mississippi Daily Mississippian, Mar. 24, 2000)
  • Mr. Russert, I was so upset by the things my wife said, I put the pedal to the medal and one of these police officers came up behind me with the flashing light and said, ‘you’re going 40 in a 25 I want to see your license and registration.’ (American University commencement address, Tim Russert, May 8, 2005)

Since the expression _(put the) pedal to the metal_ already rhymes, why not make the spelling align as well? The semantic slippage between _metal_ and _medal_ has already been noted working in the other direction (see medal » metal).

| 1 comment | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/07/17 |
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