Eggcorn Forum

Works for me. An excellent find. First-class even.
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And welcome to the forum, Gumrat.
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Can anyone else confirm this as widespread in Australia and South Africa? Is it common anywhere else? I don’t find the thousands of ghits I would have expected if it really is standard over (down under?) there.
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Here’s another take on it:

before I started covering mainframes, I thought COBOL was “Cobalt” as in the grayish metal. In fact, still to this day when saying the word, I have to make sure I cut the word off and not insert the letter. I sometimes say COmmon Business Oriented Language in my head to jog my memory. […] back in my newspaper days, I wrote an education story. I mentioned students had to learn by “rope memorization.” My editor pointed out the typo with a chuckle. ¶ It wasn’t a typo in the sense that I accidentally typed it. I actually thought “rope memorization” was a way of learning something. Of course, now I realize it’s actually “rote memorization” but I still think “rope memorization” makes sense. Learning something by heart, like how to program in COBOL, is a lot like climbing a rope. First you have to figure out the basic technique and then practice that over and over again. Over time, you are able to go higher as your mind and muscles develop. A simple mistake may cause you to fall (much like a small programming mistake causes compiling woes). ¶ The skill is learned after a lot of practice and some sore hands (both when rope climbing and coding COBOL). But with any skill, practice and additional information is needed to keep it fresh.

It clearly was a well-thought-out eggcorn for this person.
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Here’s another :

The human brain tends to make patterns out of fragments and is not always accurate. Non-native speakers also make up new cliches when native speakers mumble them and you don’t catch all the words clearly. Especially when those cliches contain words that are not in common usage anymore. ¶ My wife came to America at age 11 speaking 2 non-English languages. Cliches gave her hell. She thought “the whole kit and caboodle” was “the whole kitten and poodle”. Both kittens and poodles are popular pets, you have both a cat and a dog, so it made sense to her. Who the hell uses “caboodle” to mean a backpack anymore? ¶ She also though “to learn by rote” was “to learn by rope”, as in the habit of tying knots in a string to aid memory. Once again, made sense to her. For the love of God, people, enunciate clearly around foreigners! ¶ And since she went to HS here in the US, she has no Chinese or Taiwanese accent. So she still hits these blind spots in idioms even 30 some years later.

Wow! A clear eggcorn for some, complete with perpetrators’ confessions, and with three reasonable (two clearly attested) semantic avenues to contextually appropriate sense: learning the ropes (as on a ship, I suppose), the sequential nature of rote learning is like following/climbing a rope, and tying knots on a string to aid memory. (Not to mention cobalt and the whole kitten and poodle.)
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A nothern:

[From a related post by the author of the second one cited above:] So, the other day she got ahold of one of those Scholastic magazines they use to teach elementary school kids about stuff – usually there’s one for every holiday. St. Paddy’s day was no exception. Now, despite the Prussian surname, my background is heavily Scotts (Clan Munro) – Irish (Brady). So the wife calls me the other day and says: ¶ – “wow, the Shamrock is a plant” ¶ – “uh, yes, dear, how did you make it though school in NY not knowing that?” o.O ¶ – “we had Italians and blacks, no Irish” ¶ – “but you went to school in New York City” ¶ – “the Italians weren’t big on St. Patrick” ¶ – “but surely, someone hung one up in the hall, sometime as a decoration” ¶ – “if they did, they didn’t bother to tell me its name” ¶ – o.O “so, what did you think it was, then?” ¶ – “a rock. possibly, a fake one. ‘sham’ and ‘rock’, see? but I thought it was an Irish rock” ¶ – “no, dear, that’s the Blarney Stone”

Fwiw, I had it clear in my mind that “rote” learning was learning that followed a fixed sequence, like a point on a rotating wheel. This synaesthetically matches my experience of recitation. According to one online etymological dictionary. Rote is:

of uncertain origin, sometimes said to be connected with O.Fr. rote “route” (see route), or from L. rota “wheel” (see rotary), but O.E.D. calls both suggestions groundless.

If OED is correct, then, I and others have been silent-eggcorning the word while pronouncing it (no doubt) impeccably. Both the “route” and “rot(ate)” false etymologies are conceptually very close to the “follow/climb the rope” eggcorn.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-11-08 12:20:13)

Whether something will ever get into the database is a dark and mysterious matter. The vast majority of finds from the last few years (including many very excellent ones) are still only here on the Forum. You stand a much better chance of having it make it onto the End-of-the-Year lists that several of the more distinguished members of our community will put out in a month or two.
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Citing more examples is fine, but mostly we’re happy with a few (fewer than we have above, in many cases) and the knowledge that there are more of the same out there. A large number of citations isn’t proof that the error is standard for anybody (which is a major criterion for eggcornhood); witness the existence of many thousands of examples of specific typos that do not produce a meaningful word. But if an error that makes good sense shows up many times on a google search, and especially if it shows up repeatedly in a single document, that increases the likelihood that it is standard.

“rope learning” … is … learning by memory and then regurgitating.”

Brings up, for me, the revolting image of swallowing the rope and then slowly pulling it back up.