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
I see/hear “subsequently” for “consequently” often. Most recently, from an online discography of the Residents:
The Residents, besides being amazing, are an oddity, an obscurity, and subsequently an obsession to some.
I’m not sure whether I’ve ever seen or heard the converse, “consequently” for “subsequently”, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m not sure there’s a really eggcornish process of assumed meaning here as opposed to just people being unclear on the difference between the words and not really thinking about the meanings. Any ideas, folks?
Offline
Post hoc ergo propter hoc .
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline
DavidTuggy wrote:
Post hoc ergo propter hoc .
Hmmm…I guess I’d agree that in some cases someone might see the distinction between “subsequently” and “consequently” as negligible due to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Offline
Unless you can find an idiomatic embedding for one of the words, it would be almost impossible to know, short of a confession, whether the speaker really intended the uttered adverb or whether a switch had taken place.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
Dixon Wragg wrote:
Hmmm…I guess I’d agree that in some cases someone might see the distinction between “subsequently” and “consequently” as negligible due to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Another way to say it is that we humans tend to assume, mistakenly or not, that something (consistently) antecedent has got to be causal. P h e p h is just a formal recognition of that fact about our cognitive disposition, and the phenomenon you are describing might well be (at least sometimes) another manifestation of it.
At the least, results (consequences) can be counted on to follow (be subsequent to) their causes.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline