Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never hear it – the agonising crucifixion hidden within excruciating. What you might hear could be crush which was also a method of execution and certainly suggests pain.
One month later and in agony I was given a claim number but by that time I was in excrushiating pain and I went to the emergency room.
I twisted my ankle and then I was rolling around in excrushiating pain.
Out of personal experience: nothing is more excrushiating than chronic pain and the feedback that “You have to live with it.”
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Wow! Really common. How have we missed that one for so long?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Do you suppose they pronounce it “crush”, or “croosh”? If the latter, do they still associate it (uniquely) with crushing pain? (Or do they think of one’s breath whooshing out, or the pain swooping down on the victim, or something?)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2023-12-05 10:02:24)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Do you suppose they pronounce it “crush”, or “croosh”?
I heard the ‘crush’ variant and had a dip on the off chance of an eggcorn and there they were. But there’s a lot of it about. I pronounce ‘tooth’ and ‘truth’ as rhymes, but I often hear tuth for ‘tooth’. My roof is another’s rough. Their ‘book’ is indistinguishable from my ‘buck’, and they hear my ‘fuck’ as ‘fook’.
It may be a peculiarity of my ageing ear but I have the impression that Vowel Shifts are becoming commonplace and the tectonic plates of pronunciation now rarely rest. Some adapt instantly, anticipate the wave and merrily surf off, vocalising appropriately.
Others . . .
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