Eggcorn Forum

I was talking this morning with Theresa, the welder chic.¹ We were looking at craft materials for jewelry. She mentioned some artwork she saw on a recent trip to the American Southwest that was based on “concreations” (she pronounced it “con-cree-A-shuns.”).

“What’s that?” I say. “Some kind of funny sedimentary rock,” she replies. The light bulb switches on. “Oh,” I say, “you mean concretions.”

Concretions, as you may know, are mineral nodules formed in looser rock, usually sandstone. They have been an object of curiosity for some centuries, identified variously as dinosaur eggs, meteorites, and human artifacts. Concretions are natural formations, often building up around a fossil or some organic nucleus that becomes a fossil.

The welder chic is not alone in thinking that these artistic productions of nature have the word “create” in them. The multitude of web pages that call them “concreations” suggest that a large community of speakers have adopted the variant. Four examples.

Photography forum: “Well, my neighbor, a geologist … has looked at it and knew without a doubt it is a concreation.”

Fossil message board: “With them were smaller fragments of about 4 others not big enough to worry about. 30 ft away was another one sticking out of a concreation. Where it still sits in my cabnit wating for the day when I have the right tools for extraction.”

Mars forum: “For us folks that dont know what a concreation is. Could be fossils.”

Fossil blog: “n fact a few of them were covered in rock and we really had little clue what we would find once we started to chissel away at the concreations that surrounded the actual fossil inside.”

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¹ Not my slang. She calls herself that. My brand of male chauvinism tends to be more subtle.