Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I just came across “Felt like sell speech” in writing on a feedback form about a speaker session at a recent conference in London.
Guessing by the attendee’s name (dangerous I know) and language patterns in their other feedback I suspect they did not grow up speaking English as a first language at home/pre-school, but learnt it probably at school and on through work.
So it is perfectly possible they misheard “sales pitch” once and heard the eggcorn “sell speech”, which is really close in meaning too. Or that he learned English from someone else who had done this, particularly in a dialect using a clipped vowel sound in “sales”.
A quick bit of googlage for his|their sell speech comes up with a few nuggets including some old forum discussion:
http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/ … h.1535845/
“Griffin grabs the football, offers his “sell speech†and then kicks the football…”
https://markhmiller.wordpress.com/2012/ … something/
”...it’s not like he bad lectures me, he just gives me his sell speech…”
http://community.babycenter.com/post/a3 … d=noscript
“after the tour , you get to a room to expect your gifts….they start with their sell speech”
http://www.vegasmessageboard.com/forums … 15157.html
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will buy a ridiculous hat – Scott Adams (author of Dilbert)
Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a day; set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life – Terry Pratchett
http://blog.meteorit.co.uk
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Oooh, delicious one. There are several dozen hits for “sale speech” as well, which is just as good. This one’s a contender.
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Love these reanalysis eggcorns. We’ve seen many here that change word boundaries. Eggcorns such as
all goes well/augurs well
next door/next store
see and eye dog/seeing eye dog
safety posit box/safe deposit box
sick entire/sick and tired
once or ever/whatsoever
always me/woe is me, last draw/last straw
And, of course, the perennial classic
intensive purposes/intents and purposes.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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