Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I subscribe to “the Dilbert Newsletter” a periodic e-mail from Scott Adams. In it, there is a section called “true quotes from Induhviduals as reported by DNRC field operatives.” (Some are not true eggcorns, but I’ve left them in, they are still groaners.)
“…the cream of the corn”.
“…too many cooks in the broth.”
“The short answer is ‘Yes.’ The long answer is ‘No.’”
“Get your game faces on, because this is not a game!”
“Looks like I’ve spent the day chasing a wild herring! ”
“We are the glue that keeps things moving. ”
“Fits like a charm! Wait..fits like a shoe? ”
“See me verbally.”
“That guy is running around like a chicken with his legs cut off.”
“It just like stealing teeth from a baby.”
“It’s like the rooster guarding the hen house.”
“That guy doesn’t have a spine to stand on.”
“If we don’t start shipping things sooner lead times will just get longer.”
“I can tell you this, they are all sitting 2 inches higher in their seats, because they all just crapped their pants.”
“You’re barking up a dead tree.”
“That’s my sixth cents, for what it’s worth.”
“That’s not his cup of cake.”
“You don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot because you might want to take a walk later.”
“That raised a human cry.”
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Eggcorns or malapropisms?
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Most of them are actually blends: two idioms or proverbs with related meanings are mixed together. If this happens inadvertently, the result is interesting in its own right, though not precisely an eggcorn.
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This reminds me of something I heard a guy on the bus say last week… “People these days, they won’t give you the day or time of week!”.
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I’m not sure “day of the week” is an idiom blend. More of an idiom blunder.
I heard an idiom blend yesterday, while standing in the lodge at Washington State’s hurricane ridge: “a wilderness where the hand of man has never set foot.” Said in jest, I believe. A glance at the Google references shows that it is a widely known pun.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I vote for “human cry” as a true eggcorn. “Sixth cents” comes close, but seems to be a mixture of “sixth sense” with “my two cents.” All of them are a hoot, though.
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“Human cry” is in the database (http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/502/human-cry/).
“Sixth sense,” I agree, is quite good. Arguably, it is both an eggcorn and an idiom blend. It’s an unusual blended eggcorn, though, since it depends on a suppressed intermediate stage (“my six cents”) to explain the eggcorn.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Nothing suppressed about “six cents”—you can find dozens of examples for each of “just my 3/4/6/7 cents” (I didn’t go higher) and hundreds for “just my 5 cents.” For me, the problem with something like “just my sixth sense” is that this kind of short tagline strongly invites self-conscious verbal play. I suspect the great majority of users are well aware of what they’re doing, and it might be pretty difficult to sift out innocent uses.
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