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
I understand the metaphor used in “get a lot of flak” or “get a lot of flack”, but “get a lot of slack” sounds like a mishearing and/or misinterpretation to me. The strange thing is that when I do a web search I get more hits on “get a lot of slack” than “get a lot of flack”. So Is this an eggcorn, or have I been living under a rock the last 40 years and failed to realize that “get a lot of slack” is correct?
Offline
To me they’re a kind of opposite: if someone gives you a lot of flak they are not giving you any slack.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline
But if you look at the usages that come up on doing a search, like “This app seems to get a lot of slack, but I like it.”, it’s clear that “get a lot of slack” is intended to mean “be heavily criticized”.
Offline
So it’s an opposite used malapropistically. That is not unheard of (surprisingly common actually). But I don’t know how to make sense of it—how does the phrase with “slack†add up to mean “be criticized/griped about†or anything else that fits those contexts? So for me it is, while an interesting and fun error, not an eggcorn.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline
I think something sublidiomatic is at work. Being slagged off is much the same as getting a lot of flak, but then we’d have to accept that ‘slag’ could be misheard/misinterpreted as ‘slack’ – not too unlikely a leap, perhaps?
Offline
And, FWIW, here’s the example I encountered recently:
Fillion is over hyped for no reason at all. Sorry. I know i’ll get slack for this.
Offline