Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
An interlingual eggcorn, no less. Just saw this last night, one of the early episodes of season 7, Lorelai and Chris are discussing the etymology of “cafe au lait”, which Chris explains is French for coffee with milk, to which Lorelai responds that she always thought it was Spanish: “Cafe! Ole!” (imagine diacritics over all the e’s). Lots and lots of Google hits for this one, though the sampling I’ve seen seem to be intentional, toungue in cheek usages.
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i think this is even a brand name, isn’t it? (Café Olé)
polyglots of the world, unite ~ we have nothing to lose but our accents!
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It might be, I wouldn’t know. But that doesn’t preclude it also being an eggcorn, does it? If someone in all honesty thinks the phrase is “cafe ole” when in fact it’s “cafe au lait”, that’s an eggcorn; if some clever copywriter decides to play on the dual spellings and name a chain “cafe ole”, then it’s not an eggcorn, IMHO. In other words, I believe that one parameter for an eggcorn should be that it is a mistake made in good faith!
While we’re on the topic of clever names for cafes, during Kofi Annan’s stint as secretary-general of the United Nations, I noticed at least three different little cafes in Israel (one of them not much more than a kiosk) that seemingly independently chose the the name “Coffee Annan”. (“Annan” in Hebrew means “cloud”, so that would be “Cloud Coffee”).
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Gilibug is right. One person’s eggcorn can be another’s intentional reshaping (in two different contexts). We’ve discussed this off and on over the last year, so it’s easy to get buried in the list.
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