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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I’ve been kicking this one backwards and forwards in my mind for a couple of days.
Google hits for “shalt/shall not covert” add up to the best part of 300,000.
Problems: First the semantics, but I think that “secretly desire” covers that. Secondly it seems to be pronounced to rhyme with “overt” at least some of the time, making any overlap with “covet” more tricky. Then there are the rhotic r speakers who move the pronunciations apart in another way. And it might just be an honest spelling mistake, without so much as a hint of reshaping intended.
Oh, and it might have been spotted before, as per usual.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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JuanTwoThree wrote:
Google hits for “shalt/shall not covert” add up to the best part of 300,000.
Probably lots less than that, if my experience with Google is any indication. Or did you go to the last page of Google hits to see what the real number of hits was?
...it seems to be pronounced to rhyme with “overt” at least some of the time, making any overlap with “covet” more tricky.
It may, at least in most cases, be an “eyecorn” rather than an “earcorn” (I think I’m using the jargon properly. Someone please correct me if I’m not.).
Oh, and it might have been spotted before, as per usual.
FWIW, before starting a thread here, I routinely “Browse eggcorns” to see if the one I’m discussing is already listed, and also do a Google search on the browsing page to see if it’s been mentioned in the Eggcorn Forum/Database before. If it has, I resurrect that thread and add to it rather than starting a new one. “Covert” for “covet” is new here, and I think it’s a pretty good one.
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Google hits should certainly be taken with a huge pinch of salt but any large number indicates a fairly large (mis)usage.
I do check with Google search but there seem to have been some Bermuda triangles into which swathes of posts disappeared.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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JuanTwoThree wrote:
I do check with Google search but there seem to have been some Bermuda triangles into which swathes of posts disappeared.
Really? Are you saying that some items in the Eggcorn Database/Forum don’t turn up in the search even when the appropriate search terms are used? I wonder why that would be.
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If you put “Google search” in the Google search box, which is very meta, you’ll see cases of it working oddly. But I take back “swathes” and plead that I was suffering from hyperbole at the time.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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