Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Here’s another one from my Anthropology classes. While reading a draft today, a student consistently used the word deceased for diseased. I suppose this is a bit of a stretch but often if you are diseased, you will soon also be deceased.
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I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of this one working backwards, someone saying someone was diseased when actually they were deceased. But I don’t have it documented.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Eggcorn was mentioned here before:
An Eggcorn for returning unwanted mail? by jorkel Contribute! 0 2006-08-14 08:22:41 by jorkel
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DavidTuggy wrote:
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of this one working backwards, someone saying someone was diseased when actually they were deceased. But I don’t have it documented.
Here’s your documentation, David; I just found this one in a Census Bureau document: “Both owners diseased for a long time and house has been vacant…” It took me awhile to realize that the writer meant “deceased”.
I’d say that “diseased’ and “deceased” could be a true eggcorn going in either direction because of the meaning connection between being sick and being dead. Similarly, I used to confuse “morbidity” with “mortality”.
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Thanks, Dixon!
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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This eggcorn, or its converse, first appears as entry #636 (dated 9/15/05) on the old comment thread:
diseased’ for ‘deceased.’ This is quite common. The phrase ‘recently diseased’ alone gets over 1,000 ghits. Examples:
She hears a moaning on the other end and a voice that sounds like her recently
diseased husband.
www.halloweenghoststories…
A landlord was cleaning out the apartment of a recently diseased man and decided
to pry open an old stove before throwing it away.
coincollector.org/archive…
He was prediseased by his son, Rodger in 1980; his parents, Orval and
Georgina …
ca.geocities.com/hasenpfl…
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You guys are wonderful at documenting these things. I don’t think of these clever searches (I mean why not search for “recently diseased†—duh!—) and tend to give up after scanning a page or two of non-examples, but you pander to my laziness by checking it out! Thanks.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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