Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
I think I’ve got a goody, but now you’ll probably tell me that it’s already been done:
Is this the opposition the NPP promised the NDC? Mud racking? Please, let’s do better than that.
I also think that much of the current mud-racking attitude was started by the CONS.
Who will not consider a biography complete until a good half of it is turned into a mud-racking session (not talking about this article, ...While I’m not into mud-racking and mud-slinging, the previous committee had acted unconstitutionally on a number of occasions.
Most of the whining, mud racking, racist slurs and noise is actually coming from you guys.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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Well, as far as I know this is new. And there are two reshapings here: muck>>mud, and raking>>racking. The first seems to me less eggcornish—mud and muck are pretty close semantically, so there’s not really a major shift of imagery. Raking>>racking scores more points on the eggcornometer, I think—I guess you could think of rakes as a kind of rack.
But there may be a common misspelling pattern at work here, as well. Someone on the forum (I forget who) pointed out somewhere that words with a “long a” like “raking” often get spelled in a way that implies a “short a” according to our usual orthographic “rules.” “Racking up leaves” currently gets about 30 ughits, and you might attribute that to an eggcornish logic at work. But if you keep looking, you find that people are also “backing bread” (about 150 ughits), suffering from “acking backs” (about 120 ughits), and—my favorite—even “quacking with fear” (a number of the 40+ ughits are clearly puns, but others clearly aren’t). It’s unclear to me why this particular spelling error is so common, but it’s easy to document.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-05-07 00:05:04)
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My high-school English teacher (long ago!) pronounced it with a short a , “muckrackersâ€. I’m not sure why.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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