Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I know the expression as “that fits the bill”, but it started life as “that fills the bill” (ngram). Paul Brians thinks the original is more logical (link). The evolution was eggcorneal, I think. The filled bill was theatrical, and things that filled the bill were the acts that had lesser billing but filled out the program. Things that fit the bill, as I use it, are things that meet the list of requirements and are suited to the task at hand, per the invoice, the bill of lading, the shopping list. If you extend that line of thinking you could be forgiven for thinking that the object in question is appropriate to the architecture or the engineering of the thing we’re putting together. Lots of appropriate fitting of builds for gamers building worlds, but there are eggcorns out there too.
I look forward to the ngram from the year 2100 (like Woody Allen, I hope to achieve immortality by not dying).
Fits the build at what wonder boy is wanting this team to be.
sports forum
Yep it fits the build
Customer review of toolbox
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Contributing to this eggcorn may be the increasingly popular sense of “build” as a package of software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_build
In the good old days, we “compiled,” we said, our source code, resulting in executables that could run on targeted software platforms. The platforms were typically operating systems with all of the API hooks that the executables needed. Time and complexity move on, and those of us in the software business were soon doing “builds” that coordinated compiled executables with a large number of quasi-OS addons. The more complex builds needed to be automated by a script, and various 4GL shellscripts were developed to do the builds, tasks that nowadays are eased by high-level 3-4GL languages like Perl, Ruby, and Python.
“Fits the build” makes good sense in this context, as the opposite of what is described by the idiom “breaks the build,” a phrasing that took off in the twenty-oughts. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c … moothing=3
It was the release of a build-a bad build-that led to the multibillion dollar Cloudstrike meltdown last year.
Last edited by kem (2025-03-13 10:15:17)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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