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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I happened upon this one in a Washington Post article that quoted Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick as saying, “We want a 15-year-old boy full of vivid vigor that every 15-year-old boy has walking into the girls’ bathroom? The superintendent is so irresponsible to do this that he needs to step down.”
The Washington Post article links to an article from the Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA that also uses the “vivid vigor” quote. However, in the video of Patrick’s statement (skip to about 1:15), it sounds to me like he does say “vim and vigor” and that the WFAA article misquoted him.
Searching Google for “vivid vigor” produced mostly either links to articles about Dan Patrick’s statement or references to a 19th century work that seemed to be using “vivid vigor” compositionally rather than as a mistaken idiom. However, there were some exceptions that seemed like the eggcorn, some of them in statements that presumably didn’t have professional editing:
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Well, maybe, but “vivid” doesn’t sound a whole lot like “vim and”. Also, most of the examples you give look to me like conscious uses of the word “vivid” rather than eggcorns.
Welcome to the Eggcorn Forum, jm!
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I like it. I follows the classic familiar-for-faded formula.
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