Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
One of the puzzles from this year’s MIT mystery hunt involves eggcorns. It is a series of pictures, each representing a (supposed) eggcorn. You can see the puzzle here.
I assume the circle at the head is a metapuzzle, one that picks letters out of the 20 puzzles below it to form a clue.
I draw a blank on most of the eggcorn pictures. Here is my guess on some of them. So far as I know there is no published set of answers.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4) turban smog << urban smog ?
(5) just desserts
(6)
(7) something about naked oath?
(8) put the cat before the horse
(9)
(10) broken chord ?
(11)
(12)
(13) free king (freaking?)
(14) preying mantis
(15)
(16) insole?
(17) escapegoat
(18)
(19)
(20)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Preying mantis and escape goat were the only two I found before spotting the ‘solution’ button near the top right side and couldn’t resist clicking on it. I did so before I got to this post, via your craw/crotch one.
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Here are mine. For some reason I counted 21. Is the first thing a clue? I’ll go have a look at the answers now.
1.
2. casting call
3.
4.
5. turban heat island
6. just desserts
7. tow the line
8. bare witness
9. put the cat before the horse
10.
11. dischord
12. slow gin?
13. plain geometry
14. free reign
15. preying mantis
16.
17. shoe-in
18. escape goat
19. false witness?
20. social eels
21.
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Thank you, Peter, for finding what my eyes overlooked—the solution. I could swear the button wasn’t there earlier.
Next issue: Are there any eggcorns in the list that are worth looking at? Disappointingly, the puzzle makers haven’t understood that an eggcorn is more than a substitution of one sound-alike word for another.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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