Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I was talking with friends the other day, and the subject of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother came up (as subjects do). It brought to mind the famous limerick (attributed to no less than Oliver Wendell Holmes though apparently, according to Wikipedia at least, based on an earlier limerick by Oliver Herford). The last line reminds me, with its complex and delightful restructuring, of eggcornish jewels like a nominal egg and ovary action:
The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher,
Called a hen a most elegant creature,
The hen, pleased with that,
Laid an egg in his hat,
And thus did the hen reward Beecher.
Of course it was purposeful and not an eggcorn, and is suited only for a particular extremely limited set of contexts (i.e. you have to be talking about Beecher and a hen rewarding him for it to work), but admirable and enjoyable if nothing else.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2018-10-02 09:53:06)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Yeah, that limerick is one of the classics!
DavidTuggy wrote:
...eggcornish jewels like a nominal egg and ovary action
Coincidentally, I just noticed a day or two ago that the Russian feminine surname ending -ova (i.e., Romanoff is supposed to become Romanova when the individual is female) is serendipitously eggy.
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One of my favourite HW Beecher quotes: “A house is what a man builds when he thinks how I would like to live.” Think I picked it up when I read a Beecher bio.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Sorry, I’m slow. I don’t get it!
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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DavidTuggy wrote:
Sorry, I’m slow. I don’t get it
Nor do I.
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“A house is what a man builds when he thinks how HE would like to live.†Sorry.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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