Eggcorn Forum

One of my favorite entries in the Database is the bona fide>>bonified article. The comments are especially cool since they point out that the back formation “to bonify” has its own existence apart from the participial form. (That’s one of many Database articles that really, really needs to be expanded with more examples and analysis.) And I had the honor of hearing the infinitive in the wild a couple of years ago. I was locking up my bike in front of a library at a Certain Very Famous University just as a Certain Very Famous Scientist went walking by in the company of the requisite adoring grad student. When he was right in front of me, he said to her, “Yeah, he still has to bonify the numbers, but it’s looking really good.” As usual, I wanted to stop him and ask questions, but common sense got the better of me.

Anyhow, since n/d shifts are one (or, really, two) of many we’ve documented, I wondered whether anyone had ever taken “bonified” one step further to “bodified.” They have, but it was a real pain tracking it down – I felt very Nilepic when I managed to successfully corral the examples below. It turns out that “bodified” has quite a number of non-eggcornish uses that had to be filtered out. Hair and wine can be “bodified” to give them “body” in one way or another. In forums on religion and/or ghosts, people use “bodified” to mean something like “incarnated, manifested in flesh and blood.” And posters on car forums seem to be using it to refer to altering the body of a car, but many of those instances may just be examples of a modify>>bodify typo, which appears to be surprisingly common considering that m and b are two letters over from each other. In the four citations below, however, “bona fide” works quite well in context. The eggcorneal logic seems to be that the thing in question has a tangibility—a “body of evidence,” so to speak—that testifies to its existence. Examples:

Yeah, but Clinton was a bodified Southerner (none / 0)
He could talk the talk and walk the walk or whatever.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/12/16/131515/52

House can become immediately available within 1 month after securing a bodified lease.
http://fairburn.ga.house.info/61553-house-rent-sale

Any bodified geek interested in measuring the gamma of the new Toshiba.
Just wondering if its closer to 1.8 rather than 2.2 to 2.5. That might help explain things.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthre … 276&page=6

Ma bwoi apple brown reppin skavenger for real, certerfied, bodified real street shit right here.
http://www.allpersians.com/browse_vidfe … p?tag=skav

Nilep hasn’t been seen round these parts in about a year, but he’s still keeping a close eye on the “Eggcorns” article over at Wikipedia, and has managed to improve it (or nudge others into improving it) in quite a number of ways. Just a few weeks ago, the examples list got its most drastic shortening ever, and Chad suggested the removal of “for all intensive purposes.” I was kinda happy to see it go. That reshaping seems to show up in most articles on eggcorns, but I’ve never been convinced it’s a really good example of the breed. “Intensive” there has never made good sense to me.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-06-28 03:36:18)