Eggcorn Forum

My wife does a crossword puzzle nearly every day. I often sit in on the final moments. I’m a sort of a crossword closer. I lack the stamina to be a starting pitcher, but I’ve got enough arcana filed away in my head to retire a batter or two.

In yesterday’s puzzle, I noticed that she was having trouble with the lower right block of words. I looked at the spaces she had already filled in and spotted the problem. For “Colorado resort” she had put “Vale.”

The ski resort is Vail, Colorado, named after Vail pass, which in turn is named after a road engineer. “Vale” is a rather natural mistake. A town that is set in a mountain valley, a deep vale, could easily be called “Vale.”

The error is everywhere on the web. Three examples:

An obituary: “After graduation from Simon Kenton High School, he went to Edwards and Vale, Colorado, which he called home for 37 years.”

Filmmaker bio: “Susan is a graduate of the Serac Adventure Film School which was held in Vale, Colorado under the instruction of Michael Brown. ”

Musician bio: “He was a fellowship recipient to the Aspen Music Festival, the Festival at Sandpoint (ID), and an artist-in-residence at the Bravo! Colorado Music Festival in Vale, Colorado.”

For those who are new to the Forum, “Vale” for “Vail,” the subsitution of a common noun for a proper noun, is what we have come to call an Aunty Lehman (i.e., “anti-Lehman,” where “Lehman” is the name of the opposite error, inserting a proper noun in place of a common noun, such as writing “Lehman’s terms” for “layman’s terms”). David Bird, one of our most prolific eggcorn finders, has a nose for classic Aunty Lehmans. On this Forum he has reported witchy[Ouija] board, cripple saint [Kirpal Singh], fair’s [Ferris] wheel, pawnsy [Ponsi] scheme, and bloody merry [Mary].