Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
It’s a fairly common error. There are actually more ghits of “tie him over until” (1220) than “tide him over until” (877.)
I’m not sure if I can venture a rationale. Are there other idioms besides “tie one on” that use tie?
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“tie over” is in the database. as for idioms with tie: http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/tie ... is first search result on google for “tie idioms”. has among many others “fit to be tied” and “tie the knot”
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FWIW, here’s the example I recently encountered:
Like, if that client going to pay on time or are we going to have to dig into the dwindling reserved yet again to tie us over?
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I don’t know about anybody else, but this one has always awakened musical associations for me: a tie instructs you to carry a tone over into the next measure (or what-have-you), so tieing over means enabling to continue. Fits well. But I always simultaneous recognized this as a distortion of tide over ; if someone thought it was the standard form and gave it this meaning it would be a clear acorn.
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Does anyone have the notion of a tie in sports which may prolong play (into a tie-breaker of some sort)?
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(PS this is the Database entry: took me a bit to find it.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2013-12-10 11:20:33)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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