by and large » by enlarge
I found this in the comments to a blog (I didn’t note which one). I collect what I call ‘bloggos’ - unusual word usages I find that seem to pop up often in blogs. The complete sentence was:
I don’t have the numbers, but by enlarge, I believe older guys date younger girls.
All I can remember is that the writer seemed very literate, aside from this one slip. A Google search finds over 50,000 hits for the expression, including, for example:
Endoscopic drainage, by enlarge, fails to achieve these principles
which comes from an academic paper, here:
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Commentary by Arnold Zwicky , 2005/03/17 at 8:02 pm
“By and large”, a textbook example of an asyntactic idiom (one that doesn’t seem to parse by ordinary syntactic rules), is especially ripe for reanalysis. “By enlarge” isn’t much of an improvement, though.
In any case, “and” (normally pronounced as a syllabic n) is reanalyzed as something else in a large number of eggcorns.