Eggcorn Forum

My sister interprets for court proceedings. She writes:

Fun morning, if divorce can ever be fun … At least, that was the most fun I ever had in a divorce hearing. This was via Zoom.

Apparently OHIO (Corbin, Ohio no less [given that Corbin is a name in our family tree]) courts rarely use the word divorce; they simply call it a dissolution. So, every time I tried saying “dissolution” in Spanish, for some reason what came out was “desilusión”, and then of course I’d have to correct myself. The plaintiff spoke both Spanish and English and he was cracking up—and agreeing whole-heartedly that it was, indeed, disillusioning!

(Just for the rest of the fun:)

And the LEP wife tried to say her address and I had NO CLUE what she was saying.… I heard Cote d’Azur and figured she lived somewhere exotic, and wondered why she was doing the hearing in a parka. Turns out that was her pronunciation of DAKOTA DEL SUR. Oh well …

Oh, and the plaintiff’s attorney asked the defendant to answer any questions the judge might have, and the judge replied, “I have no questions, your Honor!” To which the attorney about busted a gut laughing and asked if that made her entitled to the judge’s paycheck too!

Anyway, the disolución/desilusión mixup (which works better in the seseo variants spoken in most of Latin America vs. Spain) is paralleled quite beautifully by dissolution vs. disillusion in English. In either one if people think one is meant when the speaker meant the other, especially if that becomes standard for anybody in a particular context or phrase like talking about divorce in euphemistic terms, you pretty much have an eggcorn. Desolation/desolación ought to fit in there somewhere too, don’t you think? Would it work in French, Tocayo?