Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
It seems that the original expression is “head nor tail of”, but many in the US and Canada use “heads nor tails of”. There’s discussion at http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogs … tails.html
The conjecture there, which I agree with, is that “head nor tail”, referring to an animal, turned into “heads nor tails”, assuming that the phrase refers to a coin toss.
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Nice insight. It would almost appear to fall into my category of a stealth eggcorn, but for the fact that it’s a full-fledged eggcorn.
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