Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I came across this one in an article I was reading today: “Having had bad experiences with sudden, drastic changes that fermented virtual user revolt”
I think this qualifies as an eggcorn—- ‘fermenting’ revolt instead of ‘fomenting’. One can imagine the seeds of revolt bubbling within a society in the way that yeast ferments a beverage.
I did a google search—- I got over 47000 pages with both “fermenting” and “revolt”. (At a quick scan of the top 50 or so, a few really were about fermenting, but most were the eggcorn.) Interestingly, “fomenting” and “revolt” only turns up 91000 hits. This could imply that the eggcorn version makes up over 1/3 of uses of the expression!
Anyway, I didn’t find it in the database, so I thought I’d post it here. Enjoy!
-john
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jschrag – Do you suppose we could FURMENT a revolt among the minks down on the mink farm? Or we could FOAMENT a revolt among the people who pick the grapes in Champagne?
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I may have run afowl of eggcorn prodigal here. Mine were tribute jokes in honor or jschrag’s eggslent entry. I do not propose them, but I will try to google them. If they come up, I will let you know. If not, I hope they made you smile.
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Believe it or not I was actually on the point of posting ‘ferment’ for ‘foment’ when I read the above post. Now I don’t have to make the embarrassing admission that I have been using this particular eggcorn myself for years.
Oops.
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Here’s another sighting:
“Which raises another question: why can we accept that Egypt can have phones ubiquitous enough to ferment a revolution, yet act surprised when a wealthier country not too far away isn’t in a similar situation?”
Spotted in a newspaper column by James O’Malley, September 7, 2015.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/com … 89719.html
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