Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
From an Amazon.com review of a CD: “But when you play the songs in shuttle play…”
This one has apparently not been mentioned on Eggcorn Forum, though other confusions of “shuttle” and “shuffle”, such as “shufflecock” for “shuttlecock” and “shuttle off this mortal coil” have been.
I couldn’t find this eggcornish meaning by googling “in shuttle play” or “on shuttle play”, and googling just plain “shuttle play” yielded too many results to comb through, though the ones I scanned were not this meaning.
Regardless of the apparent lack of other examples, this seems like an eggcorn to me, as it’s easy to see someone confusing “shuttle play” with “shuffle play” because they imagine the CD player or iPod shuttling back and forth between songs before selecting one to play.
Dixon
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Well-spotted, Dixon. There’s good evidence that “shuffle” and “shuttle” are flounders, able to substitute for each other in a variety of contexts. If you do searches for “quarterback shuttle,” “ipod shuttle,” and “shuttle the cards,” you will see plenty of examples of the “shuffle->shuttle” transition. You can see the flounder going the other way by searching for “airport shuffle,” “space shuffle” and “shuffle buses.”
I’d like to see a “shuffle/shuttle” entry in our database listed as a general eggcornish confusion, in the same way that we have entries for “flounder/founder,” “flaunt/flout” and “aisle/isle.” If you look up these entries, though, you will see some reluctance to call these context-free switches eggcorns. We’ve discussed the flounder vs eggcorn vs flounder-eggcorn issue at length here and here if you want more background.
Last edited by kem (2009-11-27 23:55:19)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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