Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I thought this was an eggcorn of my own imagination until I did a search and found that others had at least imagined the same thing orthographically. I recall hearing it first in the summer of 2000 when someone at the Washington, D.C. Greyhound bus station spoke as he got off a bus from Pittsburgh about getting “to’e up” the previous night. I knew it meant getting drunk, but I assumed the phrase described how as a result of of passing out on one’s back, one’s toes point upwards. Clearly “to’e” is the way I heard this person pronounce the word “tore” (or “torn”). I submitted this anecdote to Michael Quinion several years back, but to my knowledge, he never took it up on his website.
It seems that “toe up” also refers to a method of knitting socks and that this has added to the confusion. See, for example, http://www.knittersreview.com/forum/top … _ID=35501.
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