Eggcorn Forum

kem · 2014-01-01 09:05:16

The news outlets have been offering, over the past few weeks, the usual year-end retrospectives: who died, who made headlines, what was best, what was worst. My desk calendar says it is 2014 now. Time to pick the best of our 2013 eggcorns. Below is an alphabetical index of 450 candidates for this title, all extracted from notes we posted during 2013, year eight of the Eggcorn Forum.

The standard cautions: Not all the candidates are eggcorns, not all the eggcorn-like candidates are underwritten by good evidence.

We have about as many candidates this year as we did in 2012. Both 2012 and 2013 have offered fewer candidates than in earlier years. One of the reasons for the reduced numbers is, undoubtedly, that we have already harvested the most obvious eggcorns from the nest of English. For every eggcorn I came across this year and posted a note about, there was another that I didnâ€™t post because I found that someone had mentioned on this Forum. Sometimes, to my surprise, I was that earlier poster. My memory is not what it used to be.

For the record, we have started almost 6000 threads in our eight years on the Forum and have generated more than 15,000 posts in these threads. Thousands of users have registered to post on the Forum, but the vast majority of posts over the years have come from about 25 regulars. Half of the posts, in fact, have come from just four members. In December of 2013, one of these members, David Bird from the class of â€™08, became the first member of the Forum to cross the 2000 post mark. He also accounted for a third of this yearâ€™s candidates. We have reported him to the principal.

He probably wonâ€™t be punished. The eggcorn habit, as the principal knows, can be devilishly hard to break. Some of our earliest contributors still hang around the place. Pat Schwieterman from the class of â€™05 popped in. Peter Forster and fpberger, both from the class of â€™06, also dropped by in 2013.

The year 2013 yielded up a number of fascinating discussions. We played around with new terminology (making ourselves even more opaque to new Forum members). One of the terms was anticorn, an eggcorn that semantically opposes itself to its acorn. We also became aware of an early synonym for eggcorns, called â€œPhonetic Associative Interference.â€ And we explored the possibility of visual eggcorns Many of the best 2013 discussions started off with in-depth investigations of word histories. One of my favorites essays was the riff on fewmets inspired by a folk etymology in the book The Origin of Feces. There were also fervid discussions triggered by posts on double entendre, the grammatical pluralization of singular nouns ending in s, and wordchops.

We found a few non-English eggcorns in 2013: HÃ¤ngematte (German) << hammock, Friedhof (German hidden eggcorn), Leid (German, hidden eggcorn), SÃ¼ndflut (hidden eggcorn in German), fÃ¢chiste << fasciste (French), soufraite (hidden eggcorn in French), vagamundo << vagabundo (Spanish), and santilleen (Finnish eggcorn).

A big thanks, as usual, to Chris Waigl, the Eggcorn Faerie, for keeping the list operating in the face of software updates, spammers, and hackers. She throws a great party.

Here, then, are the 2013 candidates and their submitters. If you see any errors or omissions, let me know and I will correct the list in situ. Everyone on the Forum, not just those who have contributed to the list, is heartily invited to submit their own best-of list to this thread. Try to keep your list, if you can, to under 30 items.

Last edited by kem (2016-07-29 14:19:46)

kem · 2014-01-01 09:16:16

Here are some two dozen eggcorns that are, in my opinion, 2013 standouts. Theyâ€™ll end up on a sheet of paper I keep in my vest pocket, to be inflicted, like the previous end-of-year lists, on any discussion with more than two people in it. Seems, though, like Iâ€™ve had fewer of these discussions this year. Is word starting to get around?

We cleaned up our act a bit in 2013—there were fewer eggcorns pushing us toward an X rating. But we probably earned an R rating for violence. We were impressed, it appears, by the sheer upfrontery of a number of deft defying terms that urged us to react, burn, bugger, rough up, bluster, jerk, poke, pop, bomb, and jail:

roughled << ruffled
need jerk << knee jerk
all-burn << auburn
nosey poker << nosey parker
bomblastic << bombastic
pokeadot << polkadot
hair jail << hair gel
ovary action << overreaction
buggers << beggars/boggles
filibluster << filibuster
popperazi << paparazzi

Gentle eggcorns, though somewhat scarce on the ground in 2013, included four worthies:

longwished << languised
consoul << console
appearal << apparel
interwishing << intuition

Nothing in 2013 like our rash of religious eggcorns from 2012, but we did find a notable addition to the religion list in this term:

actalight << acolyte

Some of the best 2013 eggcorns lent themselves to a mood of sarcasm and invective. Those who disagree with us, we could say, are, itso factso, social lights with infeariority complexes that give rise to hair braid schemes:

infeariority << inferiority
hair braid << hare brained
social light << socialite
itso factso << ipso facto

Four simple but elegant rejiggings of physical/technical terms get an end-of-the-year tip of the hat:

waterclogged << waterlogged
hectacre << hectare
identic memory << eidetic memory
sleep ap/app << CPAP

For the SNOT award as the most overlooked English eggcorn reported this year, I nominate fpberger for her untimely capture of:

gruff << guff, grief

Last edited by kem (2014-01-05 22:14:15)

burred · 2014-01-02 21:14:33

I have been longueuring over my list to be able to revisit some of the pages we made this year. I had lots of fun again and I’m grateful to everyone for their contributions. In my defense regarding the number of entries, many were to report on eggcorns that others had found on other language sites. These provided a lot of my favourites of the year. The “dumbest tweeets” site was a treasure grove that produced these gems: hair jail for hair gel, hollow cost/holla course for holocaust, jet eye mind trick, for lease Navidad, mini pulse for menopause, ghanacolleges for gynecologist, wound for womb and dear ovary act.

Other hits that came in a bunch were David Tuggy’s collection of plural words, for the singular words bia, cosmo, etho, and patho. Dixon added mytho, and I molasse.

I also enjoyed the following, in nearly alphabetical order. This year there was more overlap with kem’s list than has happened in the past.

appearal << apparel (kem)
bottlism << botulism (kem)
caucuses << Caucusus (db)
consoul << console (kem)
coward << cower (dt)
damsel in this dress (db)
eminence grise (kem, hidden)
wearwolf << werewolf (kem)
werewolf (hidden, kem)
feign << feint (dt)
fewfinder << viewfinder (kem)
hectacre << hectare (kem)
identic memory << eidetic (dt)
inner wishing and into wishing << intuition (larrybob)
leaden with << laden with (kem)
Sudan chair << sedan (dixon)
survival of the fetus << fittest (azimuth)

David Bird · 2014-01-05 18:26:11

I enjoyed kem’s and burred’s list. Here are my picks that we shouldn’t stub our noses at. Again, most of the hits nominally under my name here were reported by others on various mangled usage threads.

Dixon Wragg · 2014-01-08 01:40:34

Kem, I appreciate your work in putting together lists like this. I always feel honored when my contributions are included. (It’s nice to know I can contribute in spite of not having any training in linguistics like you heavy hitters have.) And it’s very gratifying to see that about 16% of the ones in your list are from me! We haven’t run out of eggcorns yet! Excelsior!

Dixon Wragg · 2015-05-30 01:34:05

Kem, I was just now looking at this thread again and noticed that, in your initial post here, you attributed the entry “needlers to say” << “needless to say” to me. That one actually came from JuanTwoThree. I mention this not to be picky, just to be fair to JuanTwoThree.

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#1 2014-01-01 09:05:16

Best of 2013

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