Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
A quick quiz for eggcorn fans.
Setup: Many people, when they become embarrassed, or when they get too much sun, display a noticeable reddening of the skin. We use the phrase “turned beet red” to describe this change. The analogy is apt: beets are a deep red color. Almost 50K ghits for “turn(ed) beet red.”
Question: What other food sounds like “beet” and is also a deep red color?
Answer: You’ve got it. Beef. There are at least seven carnivores out there who find beets unappetizing. Samples:
Story published on the web: “Then tell us dearest Ryou… What sexuality does your yami have?†Ryou turned beef red and Bakura went silent “I… Don’t know†Ryou said….” (http://www.fanart-central.net/chapter-50922.html)
More web fiction: “Bartram turned beef red under his new beard.” (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4196674/41/ … fessionals)
Forum post about an embarrassing moment: “I turned beef red just trying to explain the whole thing to everyone” (http://allnurses.com/forums/1776649-post43.html)
Perhaps they have a little eggcorn on their faces.
Last edited by kem (2008-07-20 11:40:40)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Uhoh.
I find many ghits for “turned beat red.” Maybe typos, but if eggcorns, the imagery is kinda scary.
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I think occasional examples of “beat red” may also be eggcorns. I found one example where it seems to have survived a transfer into the past tense:
Fantasy fiction: “WHAT!†his face blew up. He jumped from his bed. He paused….looking down. He turned around to see the woman. The lady’s face was beaten red. Fable quickly grabbed his clothes and ran outside the tent.” (http://www.youngwriterssociety.com/topic24108.html)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I looked at that file, and best I can tell the lady’s face was beaten red from embarrassment, not from anybody hitting it.
(The page also features advice and criticism which is itself loaded with interesting misteaks. E.g. twice the critic says that a comma should go “in front of” a particular word, meaning to the right of —after in my dialect— that word. Also “Therefore, it is suiting that I shall be giving you a very honest critique” — suiting! Yes indeedy!)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-07-23 18:30:03)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Yes, it’s clear that her face was “beautiful,” so it wasn’t pommeled. But I was wondering if the writer might have been reaching, since the context of “beaten red” is a fantasy piece, for an archaic sounding “beeten red” (on the analogy of “oaken bucket”) and simply misspelled it.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Well, beautiful women can have their faces beaten and still look beautiful. But I think the idea was that our hero (Fable) was naked and this embarrassed her.
Yeah, the reaching for N-en might conceivably have been involved. But it seems pretty unlikely to me. Of course maybe I’m hampered by the feeling that it should mean “made of N”, not “similar to N”. Though I guess we do use “wooden” to mean “immobile like wood” and “golden” to mean “yellow like gold”.... But it seems a bit beyond what I would imagine the writer of this piece to be susceptible to.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I don’t know if this adds anything to the discussion. I think this may well qualify as an eggcorn because the speaker/writer envisions (perhaps?) the redness of a slapped face. I think the helper verb comes into play here; the writer of the fantasy fiction piece seems to be “hypercorrecting” by added the “en” (which follows the pattern of “was forgotten,” etc.). I don’t see it an attempt to use the original imagery of a beet with the “en” following “golden,” etc. (But who knows?) Of course, the snippet from the story given above also says the protagonist’s face “blew up” when he exclaimed “WHAT!” So perhaps the writer has something against faces…?
Feeling quite combobulated.
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