Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to
The forum administrator reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.
Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
From an Amazon music chat thread called “Why is prog rock dominated by males?”:
”...a good number of women where at both shows (and also the last time I saw Porcupine Tree) so I think it’s more a matter of espouser to the music than a gender issue.”
It took me a moment to realize that he meant “exposure to the music”, because both the spelling and the pronunciation of the two words are less similar than we usually see in errors resulting from the confusion process that births eggcorns. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how one could jump from “exposure” to “espouser” either in terms of spelling or pronunciation!
And yet, googling “espouser to” yields a page that asks “Did you mean exposure to?” before going on to list nearly a thousand hits, most of which appear to be that very eggcorn! And I think that, at least arguably, there’s enough of a meaning connection in some instances to support eggcornicity. For instance, in the current example, the writer is suggesting that exposure to “prog rock’ is likely to make one an espouser of it.
What say you, eggcornistas?
Offline
I think it may be part of an interesting pattern of misspelling. For instance, there are many hundreds of unique instances on Google of “foreclouser” for “foreclosure.” I’m surprised that so many people are committing this misspelling, but they are. And there may be another layer here—when I type “expouser” into my spellchecker, the first suggestion I get is “espouser.”
Offline