Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
Overheard: “I haven’t done that yet because I’m up to my earballs in work”
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Hi, Megan, welcome to the Eggcorn forum.
“Up to my earballs” is what we would call an “idiom blend” (blidiom). It combines the idioms “up to my eyeballs” and “up to my ears” into a (quite funny) blend of both. Some idiom blends are eggcorns, but I don’t think this one is because “ear” and “eye” are not close in sound and because they don’t share a common imagery (other than both being body parts).
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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