Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Spotted on Io9: http://io9.com/364424/nevermind-the-lol … s-cthulhu, in Zenpoet’s comment.
“Anything involving the LOLcatz makes me want to swallow dirty hypodermic needles while wrestling with Magic Johnson in bardwire.”
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I found a number of usages of “bardwire” on Google, though some were obviously knowing puns or reshapings (Website names that refer to Shakespeare, etc.).
I’ve also seen “bobwire,” and this seems to be fairly common, and it’s easy to understand how “barb” might be pronounced as “bob” depending on regional dialect.
Other than as a play on the nickname for Shakespeare, I’m not sure what someone might think the “bard” part would refer to. It may simply be a mishearing or mispronunciation (the actual term is barbed wire, which easily could be misheard as “bard”) that got translated in to a misspelling.
On a side note, I attended college with a man whose last name was Dwire, and my friends and I joked that we hoped he didn’t marry a woman named Barb…
Feeling quite combobulated.
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“Bobwire/barred wire/bardwire” have been contributed before, and the first two have their own Database entries. Here are the links:
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/65/bobwire/
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/626/barred/
The second citation has a link to a post of mine on “bardwire/barred wire,” and, like Jon, I had trouble coming up with an eggcornish explanation for the former phrase.
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Well, I suppose ‘bardwire’ could be a misspelling of ‘barred wire’, maybe thinking of ‘wire barring something from going somewhere else’. ‘Bar wire’ does get some relevant hits on google, see for example http://www.2desktop.com/Bar_Wire_Other_ … _4510.html for pictorial evidence. The same for ‘Barwire’, again with pic: http://item.rakuten.co.jp/onelovehome/ca_parka10/ , though this one is from a Japanese website, so there might be some Engrish going on… The fact that ‘Bartwire’ produces nothing relevant lends credence to my feeling that it’s not just sounds here.
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