Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to
The forum administrator reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.
Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Surely not the first on/and switch noted, but it still grabbed my attention:
I have seen it black on white and father has read it to all of us and we discussed it for quite a length of time.
otherwise it is merely deposited in your memory or has been written down in black on white in your notebooks.
One expects pearls of wisdom from such a learned person, written down, in black on white for posterity, worthy of
preservation and transmission
Even if it ain’t written down in black on white doesn’t mean it’s ok to do. You ARE allowed to think on your own brains, did you know that?
This is one of those cases where (what I take to be) the eggcorn makes as much sense as the acorn, and there are cases which are pretty certainly not eggcorned, where the meaning is “printed in black ink on white paperâ€. “Black and white†as a generic phrase meaning “in print†made more sense in the days when the use of colored inks was rare and color printing was prohibitively expensive.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline