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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Spotted in today’s (5 March 2008) Daily Pennsylvanian:
‘Prevor spoke about growth and celebrity licensing as well as his humble beginnings selling T-shirts in flee markets during high school. ’”When we had our booths at the flee market, we would climb on top of a van and yell and scream to the top of our lungs for people to buy our T-shirts,” Prevor said as he mounted a table in the mid-sized lecture hall. During Prevor’s undergraduate career at Penn, the business broke out of its flee market roots into a storefront venue inside Houston Hall.’
from Bianca González, ‘Steve & Barry’s CEO back at Penn’, Daily Pennsylvanian, 5 March 2008, p4:
http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com … 1836.shtml
The semantic connection between flea market and flee market could be that these markets are places that people are hurrying through and making hurried purchases (often true, given their size), or else that vendors have to compete very hard in order to get potential customers to buy from them before they flee out of reach. This second analysis makes more sense in the context (see in particular the second instance above). Either way, an eggcorn, I think. It’s relatively common: about 89,400 ghits.
Reflecting the relative uncommonness of the ending _-ea_ in English, this is the third eggcorn in the Forum to feature this confusion:
plea bargain > flee bargain: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=768
flea powder > flee powder: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=340
Last edited by hall_damien (2008-03-05 18:57:56)
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I’d need a stronger evidence of an imagery switch before I’d rule out a simple spelling error.
Though I still have never wrapped my own personal head around the “flea” in “flea market.”
I spell it “flea” because you’re supposed to, not because I believe any true association w/ fleas.
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Yes, there’s been a little discussion of this to that effect on the American Dialect Soc List since I posted it there (search here
http://listserv.linguistlist.org:8080/m … index.html
if you’re interested, searching for ‘flee’ in messages since 2008-03-04). It seems to me, though, that it’s at least a potential eggcorn; not as obviously one as many others, but couldn’t people have thought that the insect was called a <flee> because that’s what it did? I do grant that the eggcorn-ness here is not indisputable.
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