Eggcorn Forum

Anita Loos, a playwrite with hundreds of Hollywood film scripts to her credit, scored another hit in 1925 with her first novel. The narrator in Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is Lorelei Lee, a flapper-era golddigger. Her faux-naive ramblings in the book are studded with language slips. Most of Lorelei’s slips are not eggcorns. In many of them, the punning factor is too high (her comment about the Eyeful Tower she sees in Paris, for example). Some of the book’s wordplays, however, tap into actual speech deflections. As when Loralei writes “kissing your hand may make you feel very very good, but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever,” The flash given off by a quality sapphire, which has bent Lorelei’s spelling to include the word “fire,” has also found a home in the mental lexicons of thousands of other writers. A few examples:

Subsidy-published book: “and a waterfall was funded with water from pool of Safire blue to drain its water into the pond.”

Another subsidy novel: “The height of the reef on the shallow island side was ten or twelve feet, but on the ocean side it dropped off into an infinity of deep Safire blue ”

Laptop review: “A 15.6 inch case in Acer’s Gemstone design with a Safire Blue high-gloss display lid serves as the base.”