Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to
The forum administrator reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.
Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I recently encountered this in a private email:
Some of them evolve around the pomodoro technique, which is quite useful.
That inspired me to do a web search on “evolve around”. Immediately, I found (here) a whole page of links to “evolve around”, nearly all of which are clearly substitutions for “revolve around”. Check ‘em out yourself, folks, and see what you think. To me, there’s enough of a meaning connection for eggcornicity. To say things “evolve around” someone may carry the implication that things develop around a person due to that person’s considerable influence—not too different from the gravitational influence that causes things to revolve around other things.
Offline
I think you have latched onto a trend. Always hard to call these eggcorns, though, because both words, “evolve” and “revolve,” are lexicalized and both phrases “evolve around the” and “revolve around the” are possible non-idiomatic syntactical constructions of lexicalized entries—someone could come up with either of these phrases without having been exposed to the idiom before. We’ve seen this phenomenon many times on the Forum. “Attenuating/extenuating circumstances” comes to mind. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the idiomatized “revolve around” doesn’t come into play in most examples of, for instance, evolve around the question of. I suppose we might group these into an eggcorn subtype and call them “catalyzed eggcorns.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
That’s a nice distinction, kem, (in both senses of that phrase); I think it’s a very real kind of phenomenon.
.
(I still find it hard to believe that this one had evaded our nets all this time. More SNOT, for sure.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2015-11-20 17:19:38)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline