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Chris -- 2018-04-11

#1 2006-06-28 12:39:19

alexkrich
Member
Registered: 2006-06-28
Posts: 2

"firstable" (or "firstible") for "first of all"

This one seems so common that I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been covered already on this site. I first heard of it from a professor of mine, who told me that she received papers from college students with this eggcorn. A Google search for the former (“firstable”) yields 13,400 results, while a search for the latter (“firstible”) yields 648 results, and a suggestion from Google that I may have meant: “firstable.”

This seems to be a word that is still recognized as incorrect by most people, and is mainly used by non-native English speakers unfamiliar with the phrase “first of all.” This is compounded by the dubious construction “second of all,” which suggests to the casual listener that ”-able” is an ordinal suffix.

I have not yet seen any instances of this term in print; most of the use of this word seems to be confined to blogs and discussion boards.

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