Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I hear this all the time. It’s inelegant but admittedly more comprehensible to folks living in this century. “Champing” means chomping.
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A classic. The classic discussion of it is this post by Arnold Zwicky over at Language Log: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 02018.html
This is also in the Eggcorns Database; Zwicky did the write-up for that entry as well:
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/26 … t-the-bit/
The second comment there is worth paying attn to—it does a good job of documenting the variant “chafing at the bit.”
Finally, there’s some character named patschwieterman who gets all pugnacious while discussing the variant “chopping at the bit”:
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?pid=430
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