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
Believe it or not, a friend of mine has been misinterpreting “eggcorn” as “egghorn.” They already more or less knew what an eggcorn was, after I’d shared some examples with them. When I asked them why they thought it was an “egghorn,” they said “They’re different [—eggs and horns—] but together. One’s round, one’s pointy, and yet somehow we associate them.”
The idea being that it became the term for these kinds of humorous mishearings because it is itself a humorous jumbling of two images you wouldn’t expect to go together.
I seriously couldn’t believe it when I first heard them say this, but I think it might actually qualify as an eggcorn.
Offline
Valuable first-person testimony, jsomers. That’s rare.
I was surprised to see that a similar sort of internal-tension parsing of egghorn was provided earlier by eggcornquistador jorkel :
By the way, I sort of like the mistaken term “egghorn†since it has a yin-yang feel to it… An egg is a symbol of Christ, and a horn is perhaps symbolic of the devil. So, an “egghorn†must be a combination of good and evil: That is to say, we’re not sure whether these “egghorns†are a good thing or a bad thing!
And looks like egghorns led one of our members to a kind of transcendental, or at least meta, experience here.
Offline