Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I came across this in conversation today – the user was certain that she was using an acorn, and thought that the verb lynch may have been drawn from it. Surprisingly common, with many examples from books and official publications:
There he is, shitting by the church gate. It’s called a lichgate, which I always thought was a lynch-gate, on account of the lynchings the Puritans were prone to.
He watched the small lynch gate set into the heavy wooden doors barring entrance to the city. It was this lynch gate, so he had been told, that would open at five …
Proceed through the kissing gate and follow the path through the churchyard, exiting via an elaborate memorial lynch gate.
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I’m picking up so much new vocabulary from you, Peter. Sometimes English English seems like a foreign language.
Lychgate. And lych is the old word for corpse. I’ve heard them called garden gates.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Perhaps I should have provided a bit more background, Kem, but I’m pleased that information exchange isn’t entirely one-way.
One of the things I might have mentioned was the Lyke Wake Dirge (should be in blue) (and which I’ve been just playing on the banjo in Mountain Minor tuning) which is a wonderfully gloomy old song, sung over the corpse at a wake:
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.
And its eggcornish variant:
I have worked with a group (Wiccan) and we regularly Incorporated the Light Wake Dirge in to our rituals. We mostly did a slow stately “march” with rhythmic …
Last edited by Peter Forster (2015-04-29 13:22:14)
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