Eggcorn Forum

I would call “volumble” an eggcorn. My only quibble is that it isn’t a very frequent error–not many examples on the web.

Interesting, isn’t it, how a word we now associate with a spoken event (loudness) has its source in a written event (a book).

At one point in my life I did some thinking and writing about the metaphorical nature of certain sense experiences. We tend to regard adjectives that describe sight events as relatively literal references. In the phrase “The fruit is red | round | beautiful,” for example, we don’t think about “red,” “round,” and “beautiful” as metaphors. They seem to be at home in the visual realm. Adjectives of touch also tend to be taken as literal terms–the descriptors in the sentence “the fruit is heavy | gooey | cold” don’t appear to be borrowed from other contexts. Sound adjectives often have a literal feel: the adjectives in the sentence “the noise is loud | shrill | raucous” don’t feel like metaphors. But not all sound terms are literal–many, like the word “volume,” appear to be borrowed from other senses. Consider, for example, “your voice is faint | husky | muffled.“ These three adjectives look like metaphors of visual phenomena. The metaphorical trend we see in sound adjectives becomes more intense when we turn to taste and smell experiences–almost all of the taste and smell adjectives that we employ in English are either overt or subtle metaphors. In the line “the smell is sharp | heavy | pungent,” the smell adjectives bow to our other senses. Except for “sweet,” and perhaps “sour,” most taste adjectives seem to be borrowed from touch and sight experiences, as these examples illustrate: “the fruit tastes bitter (it bites) | salty (like salt) | peppery (like pepper) | tangy (has a tang, a point).”