Eggcorn Forum

The roots of pitch extend thousands of years back to the Proto-Indo-European base pi- for “sap”. Somewhere along the line it became confounded with tar, perhaps as the sap of the earth, leading to pitch black. There are 330,000 “ughits” for bitch black. Some are talking about dogs, a very few are eggcorns, and almost all the rest are fool sweeps that are confounding the google equations.

It seems reasonable to think that “bitch” in the eggcorn cases is being used as a intensifier for blackness, maybe with associations of unpleasantness or witchery. There was an M.E. sense of bicched for “cursed, bad.”(Online ED). I don’t think these are racist; let me know if you think otherwise, I can be astoundingly naïve.

Robbery account:
The funy part about it is nothing was taken I think its becouse the electrict had gone and it was bitch black. All so the room thay brok in to had black out blinds so must have been black as hell in there.
http://www.techwatch.co.uk/forums/53597 … house.html

Dream journal:
i saw a mysterious building outside. I thought it was the right thing to check it out at the time…but no. I went inside to find these shadow creatures, They were the size of a normal human, their eyes were white and there body was bitch black.
http://dreamjournal.net/index.cfm/do/jo … _id/134716

short i to long e malaprop:
Needless to say, the chocolate cake was peach black, and did not taste like chocolate.
http://www.realbakingwithrose.com/index … hread/292/

Some people misspell “black bitumen” as bitchumen or bitchuman. The latter is also a “quartet of feisty females”.

See also “pitched black” by jorkel, to which this post should be a footnote: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1314

Last edited by burred (2009-04-19 15:15:42)