Eggcorn Forum

“whit” is a word meaning a very small amount of something, but it isn’t frequently used outside of fixed phrases such as “don’t care one whit” or “not one whit of”, and similar. This makes “whit” an excellent candidate to be an acorn.

The eggcorn I’ve come across for this is “twit”, meaning a foolish person. It is a similar-sounding but not completely homophonic word that is not terribly common but still far less unusual in English (at least, American English) than “whit”. It easily eggcorns with “whit” since both of them are invariably used in derisive and derogatory contexts.

My guess is that the association being made by speakers who have this eggcorn in the lexicon is along the lines of trying to deride something for being inconsequential the way you would deride someone’s ideas by calling them a “twit”. In other words, “I don’t care one twit!” would translate to “I would be a twit to care about this”, or “I care about this as much as I would care about what a twit has to say.” That is, of course, assuming that the speaker understands somewhat the meaning of “twit” and isn’t just blindly repeating a mis-hearing of the original phrase.

This first came to my attention by way of a local talk radio host who invariably says “twit” instead of “whit” in these contexts, but examples are to be found all over the internet:

I don’t care one twit about his apologies.
http://open.salon.com/blog/libertarius/ … _jim_joyce

Why the fuck don’t they listen to the facts, this is a service economy and a consumption economy not one twit of manufacturing.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=con … owned-town

It is what Hume—the rabid atheist—warned us of in the mid-1700s. Corroborative evidence tells us not one twit about the truthlikeness of our theories.
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/post … 10_03.html

It makes not a twit of difference to the employer’s bottom line how that $50,000 is distributed.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/hale1.html