Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
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.
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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.
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