Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to
The forum administrator reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.
Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
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 09:08:57)
Offline
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.
Offline