Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
In the NY Times May 10 2014, comment to an article about Stanford’s selling its coal stock: “Secondly, clean and nuclear energy ARE cheaper, but the cost of fossil fuels (to the consumer) is low because the extra costs are disproportionately government subsidized, and then pawned off on the public in less direct ways” —“Pawned off ” for “palmed off”—meaning handed off surrreptitiously as a magician hands off a card in a trick.
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A discussion of palm off/pawn off is in our Eggcorn Database.
See also the exhaustive analysis of this issue by Ken Greenwald in a Wordwizard thread.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Yes, once again I have submitted without checking the data base, where my fine discovery is listed long ago.
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A wonderful discussion, and I remain with Elizabeth Janeway and other strict constructionists—or to paraphrase Fowler in his discussion of “rarebit,” Palm is amusing and right; pawn is stupid and wrong.
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