Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
From today’s Guardian:
some high-profile celebrity members have not been applying for vacancies but instead waiting for plumb seats to fall into their lap.
(Celebs force rewrite of Tory A-list, Patrick Wintour, 2006-08-07; emphasis mine.)
You can see more on Google; “plumb jobs” has more than 10,000 hits. Of course many of these are deliberate puns (the jobs in question being in plumbing, for example in this Observer story), but many appear not to be.
This may be a simple misspelling and not an eggcorn, but “plumb” does have the relevant senses “level, true” and “sheer, thorough-going, out-and-out” (Chambers English Dictionary, 1988), which may have influenced the choice of word.
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