Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
People talk of an anticipated event as something that is coming down the “pipe,” which gives the event a fluid quality and imparts plumbing aspects to the speaker. This confusion is easy to understand as we rarely talk about pikes as roads, especially not out here in the western part of the US.
In addition, I’ve read in discussions of the speed of delivering ions over the internet that DSL provides a larger pipeline than older modems. By extension, it’s not too hard to imagine bytes coming down the pipe.
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Today on the climate blog realclimate:
there’s a lot more warming in the pike from our projected future CO2 emissions than we’ve provoked so far.
This is by all appearances a blend of “down the pike”, “in the pipe”, and the eggcorn “down the pipe”. As Chris noted, the Database has pike >> pipe. The entry is accompanied by a slough of folk etymologies, within the walls of our own redoubt. A pike/pipe ngram and its citations show clearly that “down the pike” is the idiomatic acorn.
Edit: BTW, indiwren, I assumed you meant transmiss ions.
Last edited by David Bird (2012-01-15 17:28:31)
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