Eggcorn Forum

Many have used this as a joke. Are you sure these aren’t doing it for fun rather than really thinking this was correct?

I’m with Kem (welcome back—we’re all waiting to see the pictures). “Dire rear” looked pretty suspect to me at first, but I’ve been persuaded that it’s an authentic usage for some people.

kem wrote:

“Dire rear” has been proposed at least twice on this forum.

you said it was proposed twice.. how come it was proposed twice?
does this mean that the first attempt was disregarded or let’s just say that some are not in favor of it?
why?

jero12 wrote:

you said it was proposed twice.. how come it was proposed twice?
does this mean that the first attempt was disregarded or let’s just say that some are not in favor of it?
why?

What it means is that at least two people reported it, the second probably not realizing the first had done so. There isn’t a formal admission or acceptance/rejection procedure here: we talk about submissions, and sometimes somebody will say “this seems eggcornish to me” or “I think it misses real eggcornhood for x,y or z reasons”. Then once in a while the power that bes (Chris Waigl?) comes through and picks a few to put into the “database”. But there is a whole lot of good stuff that is just buried in the forum. The best way to find it is to use the second search engine (the google search) from the Database page.
.
I’m describing what is (as far as I know), not necessarily what should be. As things are, nobody should take non-appearance in the database as indicating unworthiness of a submission, or as a rejection of any sort. Inclusion there does mean that somebody with some authority liked it.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-10-16 19:12:49)

I’ve long been a fan of The Dire Rear for diarrhoea – Terry Pratchett uses it, in the mouth¹ of the barely literate Nanny Ogg, in Witches Abroad.

I’m pleased that it’s also been seen in the wild. With an eggcorn as homophonous as this, you wouldn’t necessarily know if you heard it in the wild; you’d have to see it written down to be sure.

But regarding the question

Are you sure these aren’t doing it for fun rather than really thinking this was correct?,

does something always have to have been seen ‘in the wild’ in order to be an eggcorn? Can a deliberately created implicit mock-rationalised etymology of a pun never be an eggcorn? A critter is still a critter, even if we only know it from domesticated examples…

It strikes me that, by analogy with malapropisms, a domesticated eggcornish word or phrase, even if only created for fun, could still be an eggcorn. I’d argue that even if Nanny Ogg were the only source of ‘the dire rear’, it should still qualify; after all, Mrs Malaprop was also a fictional character, but her utterances are just as much malapropisms as those of my mother-in-law (who, weighing twentysomething stone, is a woman of enormity) such as consistently using ‘Pacific’ for ‘specific’.

Or am I describing an oggcorn here… ?

¹ (to be accurate, the pencil – she’s writing a postcard home.)

Here I must admit that whenever I hear someone say, e.g., “Diary of Anne Frank” or “Diary of Samuel Johnson”, I hear it as “Diarrhea Anne Frank”, etc. Should I seek psychiatric help, or will frequent venting on Eggcorn Forum be sufficiently therapeutic (Imodium hasn’t helped)?

kem wrote:

Same goes for “gastric/gas trick.” Oddly enough, “gastric” and “gas” have unrelated derivations.

I ran into an example of “gas trick” today. It was clearly a pun, but it inspired me to look for “gas trick” as an eggcorn. I googled various things such as “gas trick distress”, “gas trick ulcer”, etc. By far most of the hits were puns. The few that seemed possibly eggcornish were transcriptions of spoken word media such as TV or radio shows. That usually means that the eggcorn, if any, comes from the transcriber, not the speaker. Given that closed caption transcribers must type at extreme speeds, interpreting verbal input, they come up with a lot of misspellings and mishearings, so we should be careful about attributing eggcornicity to their output. Here’s a typical example, from a transcription of Jon Stewart’s TV show:

when people get obese and they have the gas trick bypass surgery…
http://archive.org/details/tv?time=201303&q=jon%20tu

Having said that, I found one example that was neither a pun nor from a transcript—the same example kem gives in post #3 above! And there is a plausible eggcornish meaning connection. The “gas trick” could refer to tricks the gas plays on us, such as embarrassing us in social situations, or, in some contexts such as “gas trick bypass” or “gas trick sleeve”, to tricks we use to cope with gas. So I’m not giving up hope that this fun substitution will end up on the official eggcorn list someday.