paramour » power mower
Spotted in the wild:
- Meanwhile, Richard Parker Bowles, brother of Camilla’s ex-husband, Andrew, said that from the beginning Camilla approved of Charles marrying Diana while she remained his power mower. (Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch, Jan. 1995 [in Arnold Zwicky, see link])
Analyzed or reported by:
- Arnold Zwicky at Language Log (Still on the eggcorn beet)
1
Commentary by Sarah , 2005/05/15 at 5:41 pm
Could this be one of those automatic-spell-check pitfalls, in which a word-processing program changes an unrecognized word to the closest entry in its (sadly limited) dictionary? It seems a stretch, but not as much of a stretch as imagining a human English speaker hearing “paramour” as “power mower” and thinking it made sufficient sense to repeat.