Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I ran across this yesterday in a product review on Amazon—a book was “a tab bit pricey” or something like that. When I pointed it out to my husband, he brushed it off as a mere typo, but I smelled an eggcorn.
Sure enough, Google turned up 732,000 occurrences of “a tab bit” (versus 1,630,000 for “a tad bit”), the great majority of which seem to be using the phrase in the expected sense of “just a little.” Considering that I had never noticed the modified expression before, this is downright scary! (I could swear, though, that when I did the Googles yesterday, the ratio was a more believable 1:10.)
I suspect that “a tab bit” came about when somebody actually said “a tad bit,” but slurred it, so that the “d” elided into the “b.” Someone else, who was unfamiliar with either “tad” or “a tad bit,” heard this, and assumed that the expression really was “a tab bit.” This is probably one of those morphs that has occurred many times, independently. This could also explain why I have never noticed anyone saying “a tab bit”—I may have heard many people say it, but because I am familiar with the phrase “a tad bit,” I assumed that they were just slurring their pronunciation.
I contend that it is a true eggcorn, because a “tab” is a small projection from a larger object. So “a tab bit” would be a relatively small amount.
Last edited by Carol the Dabbler (2009-12-01 15:50:51)
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