Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
In a student essay, Captain John Smith “found himself in the mitts of danger.” Obviously, that means in the hands of danger. I find a lot of my students are unfamiliar with “midst” and spell it “mist,” but this is the first time I’ve seen “mitts.” Makes sense, when you think about it.
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Cute. It’d be nice to find some other examples, to up the likelihood that it’s standard for somebody, that they really think of it that way. I for one don’t often think of mitts as a synonym for hands , though I do recognize and may occasionally use the idiomatic construction keep/get your mitts off NP .
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I like it a lot … but once again, somebody got their mitts on it earlier, starting with Jorkel, then Barbara Partee, wherein Pat expatiates on the the nature of eggcorns.
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Here’s one from Tripadvisor.com: “Very peaceful in the mitts of Nature.”
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