Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I just encountered this in a Washington Post article on funny typos: “One of her favorites was in a help-wanted ad. A restaurant was looking for a ‘Sioux Chef’”.
Googling yields quite a few of them. Some are jokes, but quite a few are people really mistaking the one for the other. But, in scanning a few pages of Google hits, I didn’t see any examples that seemed to indicate the kind of meaning-confusion that would make this error an actual eggcorn. They just seemed to be misspellings (or more accurately, substitution of one homonym for another). In some cases, the “sioux” substitution was in the context of someone asking someone else what the term “sioux chef” means. So I wouldn’t call it an eggcorn based on what I’ve seen of it so far.
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The examples of “Sioux chef” I’m seeing on the web look to me like puns, funny stopping points between “Sioux chief” -> “sous chef.” You can buy T-shirts with the “Sioux chef” pun on them. With a common pun you would expect a few people to miss the joke and adopt the spelling.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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