Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
Found within two sentences of one another in a student paper…
“But as loft a goal as that may be…”
Next sentence…”As far as ascetics are concerned…”
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The first one may just be a typo: “But as lofty goal as that may be…” doesn’t work; you need the ‘a’ in either case, so it’s possible the ‘y’ was just omitted. Whether this is potentially an eggcorn or not probably depends on further context.
The second one is more likely to be classified as a malapropism or as an instance of the Cupertino Effect, depending on whether the student actually wrote “ascetics” initially, or if the first attempt was a horribly mangled spelling of “aesthetics” for which “ascetics” was the spell checker’s best guess.
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