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Chris -- 2025-05-10
#1 2012-07-16 20:21:36
- kem
- Eggcornista
- From: Victoria, BC
- Registered: 2007-08-28
- Posts: 2887
shrill << skirl
“Skirl,†meaning to scream or shriek, is a Scandinavian word that found a home in Britain’s Danelaw. The term is often associated with the sound of bagpipes (“The skirl of the pipes called me home.”). A number of people see or hear the adjective “shrill†in place of the noun “skirl.” “Shrill†isn’t a bad description when the topic is bagpipes.
Oodles of examples on the web. Three of them:
Blog entry: “ With a countdown and the shrill of the bagpipes he was off. â€
As published in the book They Fight Like Devils: Stories From Lucknow During the Great Indian Mutiny, 1857-58: “... with the continuous sounds of hacking and bashing and jabbing, and with the constant shrill of the bagpipes.â€
Amazon book review: “Litteral or, symbolic, it draws you into the pages of the book as strongly as the shrill of the bagpipe !â€
Do some speakers think that the phrase is “squirrel of bagpipes?”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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#2 2012-07-17 05:48:28
- Peter Forster
- Eggcornista
- From: UK
- Registered: 2006-09-06
- Posts: 1274
Re: shrill << skirl
Shrill works for me, despite a great fondness for pipe music.
They’re not easy to play either:
For myself, I would rather the skill of the bagpipes of a Highland regiment in full blast than five minutes of Miri music from a full orchestra.
Perhaps the association of bagpipes and kilts leads to unconscious errors like this:
The haunting skirt of the bagpipes during a private evening in Inverness, treasured family tartans,wee drams of single malt whiskies on a private distillery tour…
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#3 2012-07-19 09:55:14
- buzhwa
- Member
- From: southeast Michigan, USA
- Registered: 2007-01-05
- Posts: 20
Re: shrill << skirl
This makes me wonder about frequency effect of eggcorns. Some of them, like the above example, are centered around a fairly infrequent word like skirl (fewer than 1 per 10 million hits in the COCA corpus; fewer than 3 per 10 million hits in the BNC), whereas others occur from quite frequent words.
And that squirrel picture slays me!
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