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
From a student essay: “Odysseus’s ship became chip wreck.” Makes sense to me—it was so wrecked there was nothing left but chips.
Offline
Really funny. Perhaps nothing more than a misspelling, though. It’s almost impossible to dig up any web documentation showing others making this mistake—searches for “chipwreck” turn up mostly puns (Alvin the Chipmunk, potato chip breaks, poker losses). In addition, the lean is not quite right. The perp has taken a really common word, “ship,” that presumably everyone is familiar with, and substituted for it a lower frequency “chip.”
Last edited by kem (2014-01-04 19:38:49)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
I love it. A student essay is not an ambiance where you expect wordplay, is it? (Or what kind of essay was it, Catherine?) I’d tend to think the student would have done it with tongue restricted to the oral cavity, in which case it might well be an eggcorn.
.
(Be interesting to see, for modern-day college —or is it high school?— students, how much more common ship meaning ‘boat’, as opposed to ‘send for delivery elsewhere’, is than chip with the meaning ‘little bit/piece of something’. The latter has got to be pretty common, too.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline
The noun “chip” is about 14 times less frequent in English than the noun “ship:” https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c … ip%3B%2Cc0
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
Wow! I did not think my intuitions would be that far out of whack! 14 times is a lot. And even with computer chips and all. It is in books, where I would expect the notion of ships to be bigger than in conversation. I should check out a conversational database, I reckon.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2014-01-05 00:09:41)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline