Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2011-03-08
First and second person accounts of overheating the popcorn until it burns.
I used to think it was “That’s the popcorn in the kettle….. black.” i had no idea what the black was for.
http://www.moopy.org.uk/forums/archive/ … 4-p-2.html
I saw a guy comment the other day that a situation was like “the popcorn in the kettle black”.
http://www.redditgadgetguide.com/r/AskR … on_a_limp/
she devised the useful idiom, ‘that’s the popcorn in the kettle black.’
Mother
I don’t think this qualifies as an eggcorn. It looks like what Dave Tuggy would call a mondegreen in his useful, more liberal definition, that is, a misheard word or idiom or lyric that is phonetically reasonable but semantically catastrophic.
Last edited by burred (2012-05-17 10:08:57)
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It seems pretty eggcornish to me. I’d say it has at least as much meaning-connection as some of the officially recognized eggcorns. Putting it into the context in which someone would say “That’s the pot calling the kettle black” (i.e., a situation wherein someone who has an obvious failing has just hypocritically denigrated someone else for the same thing), it makes a sort of sense to liken the hypocrite to burnt popcorn (or other offal). But then, my judgment may be distorted by the fact that I’m actually eating a bowl of popcorn, some of which I burned, right this moment.
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