Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
My friend Sherman, a master of the mangled phrase, came up to me one day and told me he had to take the day off to go a funeral. Apparently, he had been asked by the family to be a ballbearing.
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I’m guessing your friend intentionally replaces words with humorous sound-alike words. I can’t imagine he truly believes the word is “ball bearing” ...if he knows what a ball bearing is. Nevertheless, it’s certainly humorous language usage, and probably a malapropism. By the way, here’s my recent post on “pallbearer:”
PAWN bearer (pall) by jorkel Contribute! 0 2007-03-26 06:27:57 by jorkel
So… I’m guessing your name is inspired by “Schro:dinger’s cat.”
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Actually, he used “ballbearing” quite seriously. And incidentally, was convinced that it was proper usage. Scary, but true. I’m trying to think of some others that he coined unintentionally.
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Well, if there’s a particular imagery he associated with a ball-bearing—perhaps helping the casket move along—then we might have an eggcorn here. I’ve run a number of Google searches—including phrases like “ball bearing for” with “funeral” and “casket”—to see if anyone else has made this mistake, but I haven’t turned up anything. Most eggcorns are common enough mistakes to produce thousands of sightings, but this person’s language reshapings sound rather singular. Feel free to post more of them, and we can pick apart which ones might be eggcorns.
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