ectopic » eggtopic
Spotted in the wild:
- I got severe abdominal cramps and went to the ER… turned out it was a ruptured ovary from an eggtopic pregnancy. (link)
- If it is in the tubes, it’s a eggtopic (shpelling?) pregnancy and can be horrible. (link)
- In the case of an eggtopic pregnancy, when the egg or child get suck in the fallopian tubes, abortion is a must. (link)
Another “egg” eggcorn to set alongside eggclair and eggcorn itself.
This one seems to be fairly infrequent; it gets only about 40 hits on Google as of this writing, and at least a couple of these have parenthetical comments indicating that the writer is not confident of the spelling of the word. However, it does clearly involve a genuine reanalysis. Phonetically, the voicelessness of the [k] in e[k]topic is not particularly salient because of the following stop; interpreting the first syllable of the word as an instance of the morpheme egg is not only consistent with the acoustic pattern, but also makes sense semantically, since the defining characteristic of an ectopic pregnancy is the location of the fertilized egg. (Google also turns up a comparable number of examples of the spelling egtopic, which suggests a phonological reinterpretation but not a morphological one.)
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Commentary by Tim Kerr , 2005/03/20 at 2:25 am
Road Lice (sin. road louse - although, by nature lice are never singular!)
Road lice are rental campervans and motorhomes that infest the roads of New Zealand. They tend to travel in small clusters, slowly. They are almost exclusively painted white. The term was first revealed to me by a truck-driver in March 2005. I do not know how long the term has been extant, nor the origin of it.