Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
In his 2005 introduction to his 1999 novel Dead Souls, Ian Rankin comments that a fan took him on once for his use of “trellis table” for “trestle table.” The two sound a bit alike. Many, though certainly not all, trestle tables have crossed pieces of wood for support, a pattern like that in a trellis. Google gives 747k hits for “trellis table” and 304K for “trestle table.” Looks like the eggcorn is winning out.
Herb
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Herb—I bet you didn’t put quotations around “trestle table” and “trellis table” when you Googled, so Google thought you wanted to know how many Web pages have both the words “trellis” and “table” somewhere on the page. But they’re not telling you how often the two words are found together in the desired order. For that, Google “trellis table” with the quotation marks around the phrase. I got results more like what I would have expected: 133, 000 for “trestle table” and 21,200 for “trellis table.” 21,000 is still an awfully big number, and I think the semantic explanation might work. However some might feel that the difference in sound between “trellis” and “trestle” would make this a weaker candidate.
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