Eggcorn Forum

Hello dear eggcorn community:

I saw this post and am thinking it is time I speak up again. Because the person who is maintaining the site, FWIW, that is basically paying the monthly hosting fee, keeping the domain alive, kicking the SSL certificate when it expires, and clearing out error logs, is me, Chris, the original creator of it.

The story of my disengagement is long and convoluted, and there are no particularly good reasons here. Initially I started developing some doubts about where the entire eggcorn entreprise was going right when I got busier after a career change. At the time the forum was still lively. Then came a trans-Atlantic move, and the decision to go back to graduate school and develop my own research portfolio in a field that is not linguistics. At that point posts had gone down quite a bit, and I felt quite guilty about not doing more to put the site onto a better footing. I never wanted to shut it down. It’s simply that my main mode of reacting when I’m conflicted is avoidance. When I came to defend my thesis, which, as those of you who have gone through the process, is a task that can almost without limit absorb the candidate into what feels like a space-time-wormhole, I pretty much stopped looking. And from there I just kept doing the absolute minimum for the site not to disappear. Most of the time it has been Ben Zimmer who sent me email when it was down or else in trouble, often weeks after you folks saw issues.

But it shouldn’t remain here.

It’s not that I have much free bandwidth to undertake any monumental technical tasks here and now. But recent times have nudged my internet engagement away from social media and towards more individualized modes of communication such as mailing lists, old-style blogs and websites. This is in fact how I saw this post: I went back and resurrected my feed reader, which is subscribed to the forum. I also recently reconnected with Ken Lakritz, who introduced me to Kem Luther’s delightful book, of which I now own a copy.

So maybe it’s time to tackle the elephant. As the saying goes, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So where do we stand?

1. The underlying technology of both the Eggcorn Database and the Eggcorn Forum is hopelessly outdated. In fact, the site is throwing constant PHP errors. PunBB is defunct, as are several components it uses. For better or worse, when I created the site, I modified the source code in customized ways. In small ways for the Forum – at the time, it was the only way to allow utf-8 characters. The Eggcorn Database is “hacked” from a very old, vastly outdated version of WordPress. (In fact, for a while ~ 10-15 years ago this made the site very vulnerable and I had to remove various malware incursions. At one point it was attempting to be a Canadian rogue pharmacy. But it’s now so outdated that no one is targetting this version any longer.) Basically, there is no straightforward upgrade path for either the forum or the database.
2. On the plus side, I have the actual SQL database and never intended to let it get lost. And it is quite possible to extract all the database entries (or forum posts) and … well reuse them.

1. I am still conflicted about the eggcorn entreprise and the status of eggcorns.

   So there are several areas here that need discussion. Possibly with input from more people than are here.

   1. The technical way forward

   The easiest thing for the forum would be to a) turn the existing forum into a static site and thereby preserve it forever and b) move to a community management site for the discussions. That community may or may not have the same focus as the current forum. The eggcorn database is a bigger issue. I have an inkling of what I would like to happen, but I’d like your input first. And what should be done depends on what the thinking is on 2. below

   Something does need to happen though, because the site is broken, and also I dislike our web host very much. I’m ready to move away from it. At least I should be able to see in a more timely manner when the site needs repair.

   2. The way forward for the discussion about eggcorns

   I’ve seen this sort of site succeed mostly when there was a strong, highly engaged individual who either made it their life work, or made it their retirement project, or had a strong institutional and professional interest (and backing) to run such a thing. None of these are something applies to me. In fact I have more ideas about how I don’t want eggcorns to be discussed than I have positive ideas of what the eggcorn enterprise should look like. My initial discomfort had to do with demarcation issues – eggcorn or, you know, one-off flub? And also the glee of pointing out other people’s language errors that I didn’t want to police, but find personally deeply distasteful. Which brings me to …

   3. The human way forward

   I still am and anticipate being severely limited in bandwidth. I certainly can’t be the moderator of a community, and not even the lead of one either. This consideration made me hesitate to move to improve things here because you folks were so few, and well behaved, that I could justify to myself leaving it unmoderated. But … that’s not really an option. And as the original founder, I also admit that I’m not ready to hand the Eggcorn Database over to someone else completely. I do feel somewhat proud and a little bit proprietary over it.

   With this, thanks for your attention, and thanks for your commitment. I’m not really writing to justify my course of action or, as it were, inaction. It is what it is right now. Call it a state of aporia if you like. I still care about eggcorns and The Eggcorn Database.