lip-sync(h) » lip-sing
Spotted in the wild:
- “After baseball, Congress tackles lip-singing. Ashlee Simpson writes new book exposing the ugly rumors of lip singing on a national level…” (link)
- “Lindsey Lohan Caught Lip Singing. Seems like all the celebrities are getting busted lately!” (link)
- “To the audiences dismay, almost the whole performance was lipsung.” (link)
- “I greatly enjoyed the Caroline Rhea gala, but was brought to tears by the opening act, the acrobatic Italian who dressed Like Luciano Pavorotti and lipsang …” (link)
- “Well she lipsinged….lol” (link)
Analyzed or reported by:
- Douglas Wilson (American Dialect Society mailing list, 22 February 2005)
- Ken Lakritz (link)
Doug Wilson reported “hundreds of Web examples”, and Larry Horn added: “I’ve been using that one for years, at least since a 1994 “Words and Meaning” final exam, so it’s been around that long. I first came across it on a religious web site, of all places, in the gerundive form (”lip-singing”).” Wilson noted that “lip-sung” and “lip-sang” were also to be found (see examples 3 and 4 above) — and “lip-singed” as well (example 5 above). Examples 1 and 2 are from Ken Lakritz’s commentary in the Eggcorn Database.
Lakritz explained the motivation for the eggcorn: “Lip-syncing is the practice of pretending to sing by synchronizing your lip movements with a vocal soundtrack. This gets turned into ‘lip-singing,’ which I would understand as appearing to sing with your lips but without a voice, i.e., much the same thing.” It might be that some people are unaware of the fact that the “sync(h)” of “lip-sync(h)” is a clipping of “synchronize”/”synchronization”.
1
Commentary by Simon Beck , 2006/06/30 at 1:18 pm
It could also be influenced by the phrase “lip-reading”, implying the visible movement of the lips.