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Chris -- 2025-05-10
Hi Eggcornologists, long time no post.
Someone on facebook commented that a friend of mine, who is growing a mustache, looks like a ‘pederass.’
Google gave me this, one of a few examples:
“Apparently these brainwashing asshole Scientologists are claiming that Jesus was a pederass. I guess it seems that accusing someone as a pedophile is the “cool put down” nowadays. I’ll get to that in a moment.”
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fusea … ID=1435843
I’m struck with “ass” being a possible image reshaping to indicate the act of anal fornication. I don’t know if that’s a stretch or not. In fact, in thinking about it, I thought of “Pet-her-ass” and score:
“If the French want a petherass they can have all of them. I will gladly pay a “ship all the petherasses to France” tax each year if they are so fond of having them.”
“Let’s not get bogged down in semantics.”—Homer Simpson to Gary Coleman
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“Pederass” is a significant eggcorn. Over 2000 ghits, and a couple of hundred ughits. A few of the sites seem to be puns, but most of them are sincere mistakes. “Petterass” is also significant-it occurs about a quarter as much as “pederass.”
“Petherass” would be a nice (nice in a grammatical sense) eggcorn, but it is so rare that it may be an intentional mistake. However, at least one person (http://www.whitesoxinteractive.com/vbul … hp?t=89081) confesses to mishearing the word “pederast” as “petherass” (But the mishearing occurred while watching The Big Lebowski, and it is possible that the word is intentionally mispronounced in the movie.). Some of the many “petterass” examples may actually be “pet-her-ass” mistakes.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I think “petterass” is great—in my bleary-eyed morning post, I didn’t even think of that possibility. Well done, kem!
“Let’s not get bogged down in semantics.”—Homer Simpson to Gary Coleman
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