Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Not quite sure why someone would use a breakfast pastry as a light fixture or seek recipes for lighting fixtures, but it happens.
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Is this a mistake that ever happens in speech, or only in print? If it’s just print it’s an easy typo, but when spoken the words sound different enough.
(In America they sound even more different, because ‘scone’ is pronounced to rhyme with ‘bone’.)
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It’s unlikely, then, that Americans (or many Canadians, for that matter) would make the change from sconce to scone, because they rhyme scone with stone. We can call these benighted souls the stoners. Australians, on the other hand, rhyme scone with gone. They will be goners.
By this scheme, the Scots are 99% goners. Two out of three people in England are goners, and the other third are stoners (link). With all these goners about, surely some could mistake “sconce” for the plural of scone?
The more rococo among the sconces can be seen to resemble the physiognomy of the scone, and for that matter the original scones were round and flat, usually the size of a small plate). Moreover, I know from a wilderness canoeing experience that extreme hunger can make almost anything—a distant mountain range, your own canoe, your canoeing companion—begin to resemble a mouth-watering food item. One might propose that eggcorns are more credible that shift imagery towards edibility.
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