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Chris -- 2018-04-11
From Gizmodo comments here:
http://gizmodo.com/5439805/bono-you-got-it-all-wrong
Commenter: RedEyeNinja—1/4/10
@Prostate of Grace: @The5thElephant: The day “professional” athletes will make an earnest day’s wage rather than thru the arbitrage of their projected talents is the day we perfect robots playing football, soccer and crickets…that or genetically modified humans bred solely for the sake of providing sports and entertainment…steroids are mandatory.
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Welcome to the forum, ioksotok.
The “earnest/honest” switch appears to be common, as you can see from searches for the phrase earnest living. Casual perusals of google hits for the earnest truth, an earnest mistake, and an earnest answer also turned up some arguable exchanges of “earnest” for “honest.” The funniest switches were the half dozen that included the phrase earnest-to-goodness.
The roundtrip version, “honest” in place of “earnest,” also occurs. See, for example started in honest and began in honest.
I suspect that we could find “earnest->honest” and “honest->earnest” exchanges in non-idiomatic (or loosely idiomatic) contexts, if we had the patience to look through enough examples. These two words come close to being what we term “flounders.”
Thank you for reporting this overlooked eggcorn.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I had been mulling this one over for a few days and was flummoxed by the similarity of “an earnest” and “an honest day’s work.” Another oddity is that I would have thought “earnest” less familiar than “honest”. Eggcorn with flounder makes sense.
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Hey, ioksotot, welcome to the Eggcorn Forum! Any friend of Azathoth is a friend of mine!
;^D Dixon
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