Eggcorn Forum

True—I was wrestling with just this problem before I posted “vanilla envelope.” The “plain vanilla” idiom you’re referring to—at least as I understand it—means “absolutely typical, very ordinary, of the expected sort,” etc. To me, that’s a 4.5” X 9.5” envelope—or one of the smaller, private letter-size envelopes. An envelope larger than those wouldn’t be “plain vanilla.” (Though of course “vanilla” is also a color word, complicating things further.) So to disambiguate things, I chose as my first three citations ones that made it clear the envelope had to be a good deal larger: a typical 9 X 12 manila envelope would indeed accommodate a small collection of poetry, an 8 X 10 glossy or 5 floppies, but a “plain vanilla” envelope wouldn’t. The fourth citation admittedly remains ambiguous, but I included it anyway because I found the tale of arson it was part of chillingly interesting (and it’s possible it’s an example of the eggcorn).

Also, the idiom “plain manila envelope” gets 658 hits while “plain vanilla envelope” gets only 77 hits. It’s impossible to interpret such raw numbers conclusively, but the fact that there are so few “vanilla” hits suggests to me that lots of them are eggcornish.

From the mouths of babes. My 4 year old grandson, my buddy, likes me to take him to get a manilla ice cream cone.

When I was a boy, I thought it was “vanilla envelope” and “vanilla paper”(the same yellow-creamy-white color as the envelope, cheap to draw on). I thought it was vanilla paper because it was the color of vanilla ice cream.

Plain Vanilla or Manila Envelope locks in from the other side too. Back in the good old days, if you ordered something embarrassing, such as pornography, the ad used to say that they would mail it to you “in a plain brown envelope.” The idea was that your mailman would not be able to tell that you ordered porn. The Plain Brown Envelope would not have an embarrassing return address on it.

Nilep wrote:

The appearance of both “vanilla envelope” and “manila envelope” in this example makes me suspect that it’s a simple error rather than a true eggcorn.

I posted this so long ago that I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking in the case of each example chosen, but I have a tendency to choose both unambiguous and ambiguous examples if I can find them. I think I vaguely remember picking that vanilla/manila example exactly because of the doublet.

In any case, yeah, that makes it questionable as an eggcorn. But to me it’s clearly not a “simple” error. The person wrote “manila” correctly (with one “l”) in one case, and “vanilla” correctly (with two l’s) in the other case. That isn’t simple—it’s downright weird. They were clearly thinking of the standard forms of the two different words even though they were using them in consecutive sentences. This isn’t a case of a one-letter substitution, and it’s a bit hard to explain.

But you know what, this kind of weirdness happens all the time—I’ve seen lots of similar examples over the years. It’s especially common on newspaper websites; often the headline will be correct and the first line of the article will have the same word eggcorned. I think this probably occurs most often when someone writes something, and then later realizes they’ve got an error (whether it’s a misspelling, malaprop, or eggcorn). Then they go back and fix one instance of the problem without realizing there’s another one in the line above or below. That may have happened in my example, but I usually expect the first instance to be the correct one in that kind of scenario.

And as I explained at length in an earlier post, the “plain vanilla” data looked unclear to me. It still looks unclear to me. Sorry.

As for the counts, 57 for “a vanilla envelope” sounds about right. But I was counting “vanilla envelope.” Today, if you filter out “plain” in the advanced search setting, the “vanilla envelope” search returns 1180 raw hits, and 435 unique hits. (I don’t think I was aware of the raw/unique distinction at the time I posted this.) If anyone wants more unambiguous examples, they’re easily available.

patschwieterman wrote:

But to me it’s clearly not a “simple” error. The person wrote “manila” correctly (with one “l”) in one case, and “vanilla” correctly (with two l’s) in the other case. That isn’t simple—it’s downright weird. They were clearly thinking of the standard forms of the two different words even though they were using them in consecutive sentences. This isn’t a case of a one-letter substitution, and it’s a bit hard to explain.

Yes, you are right: it is not a simple error, in the sense of easy to make or easy to explain. (By “simple” I intended “less than a true eggcorn, lacking semantic reanalysis,” though I guess I wouldn’t argue too strongly even for that sense of “simple.”)

I wondered if it might be a spell checker artifact, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. (The first suggestion for *manilla is manila, and for *vanila is vanilla in MS Word 2003.)

In any event, jorkel is right that the existence of questionable examples does not serve as counter evidence to the clearly eggcorn-ish examples.

I found a new example of this today:

MacBook air goes from 0.76in down to 0.16in at the thin end. The thickest part is thinner than the Sony TZ Series. 0.76in vs. 0.8in. It’s so thin, it even fits inside a vanilla envelope – as Mr Jobs demonstrated.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/01/15/macbook_air/