Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
I’ve got to stop listening to talk radio. Just heard a host refer to herself as self-defecating. Not as a joke, and not meant in relation to defecation.
Google finds others – obviously many jokes and puns, but some legitimate mistakes. I am not claiming this is an eggcorn, because I don’t even want to think about the possibilities as far as the imagery.
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I could have sworn that this one had already been contributed, but I can find no sign of it. I must have been remembering this Language Log post by Mark Liberman from 2004 in which he discusses “self-defecating” in terms of “urban legend eggcorns”: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 01394.html
It’s worth reading—like virtually any ML post on eggcorns (or anything else).
Last edited by patschwieterman (2007-06-07 17:04:28)
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I almost fell off my chair laughing at that one. My impression is that it is indeed an eggcorn in many instances: There are probably a lot of people who would like to appear intelligent enough to use the term “defecate” as a euphemism, but their language sophistication ends when it comes to knowing what “self-deprecating” is.
The imagery of “self-defecating” works mainly on a figurative level—to mean self-defiling, self-debasing, or whatnot—so it’s far more sanitized than a literal interpretation.
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