Eggcorn Forum

When I first saw btouburg’s post, I assumed that this had to be a flukey loner. But I googled it anyhow. Nope, this is widespread, showing up in all sorts of places. The first citation below, for instance, is from a blog post written by poet Bob Holman, who produced the United States of Poetry program for PBS. (Judging from the post, he also has excellent taste in art-rock.)

But is this really an eggcorn? My first instinct would have been to say, no, this is just a malapropism driven by the shared structure of “acap-l-.” But notice that a number of writers have capitalized “Acapulco,” apparently rationalizing the malapropropism and interpreting it to mean something like “in the style of the singers of Acapulco.” So now I’d say that the capitalized versions at least are candidates for eggcorn status. And is this a “jewel in English usage”? Well, I like it.

Examples:

Doll kicked Celtic R&B, told tales, did an Acapulco version
of “Paper Roses,” and flamed through the strobes of the 70’s.
http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/aa050598.htm

And it sounds fine when you sing it Acapulco, too.
http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?thread … essages=15

“I’m goiing to sing Pieces of Me, but being that I don’t have my band here, I’m gonna sing it Acapulco”. So she starts singing and there’s this kid in a wheelchair asking “Hey Ashlee, you ever think about changing your song’s name from Pieces of Me to Pieces of Sh—” and they cut it at that point.
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:McIl … o%22&hl=en

‘Suggestion’ is an extremely rousing version, renamed ‘Saying No in Den Haag’ by Ed. Stone and Mike sing an ear splitting acapulco version of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ before ‘Porch.’
http://www.angelfire.com/ny2/steveo/

Louise: “We don’t need the guitar – we sing better acapulco”
http://www.freewebs.com/mzungu/quotes.html

I thought that maybe I was dreaming – but I wasn’t – when I heard Kirk Franklin, on national television, ask a performer to sing “Acapulco.” (!) The word he wanted was “a cappella.”
http://www.michronicle.com/news/index.p … &Itemid=38

“I sing a capella, because that is the tradition,” he said. “The translation of ‘a capella’ is ‘Acapulco,’ as in, ‘Son, you need to sing in Acapulco because you’re scaring the livestock here.”
http://www.corpuschristi.bbb.org/2001/f … 17808.html