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Chris -- 2018-04-11
A guy I used to work with told me more than once that when he was in the military service overseas, he and his buddies would go to the “red line district” when they wanted some female companionship. I wanted to ask him why they called it the “red line district”. Possibly there was a red line painted on the ground that directed you to the girls? (instead of the red lights that designate a red-light district).
In a Google search, “red line district” gets about 400,000 hits.
“Red light district” gets about 1,500,000 hits.
Last edited by RandyOlson (2010-09-21 00:23:09)
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Perhaps the red line marks the boundary of the district rather than the path into it? Or maybe the tachometer on the soldiers’ circulatory systems was redlining?
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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The Google hits for “red line district” are a bit misleading since there is apparently a band with the name Red Line District (although that itself could be an eggcorn), and the phrase also seems to come up in discussions of the historical practice of redlining (mortgage discrimination).
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The verb “to redline” is not uncommon. It has been around since WWII (probable origin in military slang) and was recently bruited about in economics as a bank tactic for declining mortgages in depressed areas. To redline means, in general, to mark out something for special attention, often as a warning. So a “redline district” could be one that is off-limits.
Good eggcorn.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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There are quite a number of online comments about the Japanese term “akasen,” which refers to a red-light district but literally means something closer to “red line district.” The explanation typically given is that police maps would draw a red line around the area—I have no idea whether that’s a folk etymology or not.
I’d bet that some of the instances of the phrase are eggcornish, but there are clearly number of valid, competing uses (the band, the Japanese instances, legitimate non-eggcornical uses of “red line”) that may account for most of the hits. This one probably needs to be evaluated example by example.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-09-21 12:10:42)
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