Eggcorn Forum

While playing poker you can bluff, rebluff, and perhaps even rerebluff (or should that be rebluffbluff?). But when a contractor writes on a homebuilding forum that

“I know somebody [is] going to rebluff my statements about rebar but this is what I do for a living everyday,”

or when a blogger writes this about the painter George Catlin:

“Still pressing for acceptance of his work by the United States Government, he was rebluffed once more in 1856…,”

it seems almost certain that “rebluff” is being employed in a context that requires “rebuff.” Since the “buff” radical did migrate into English with the expanded “rebuff,” it is a lost radical (actually, a never-had radical). Lost radicals are almost always temptations for serial replacers. To bluff, in the sense of warding off by an exaggerated show of force, shares some semantic space with “rebuff.” The “buff” part of “rebuff” originally meant “to puff.”

I think the first example the idiomatic word should be rebut.

“Rebut” or “rebuff” as the acorn for “rebluff.” It’s a tough call, isn’t it? Many contexts fit with both interpretations.

Most of the OED citations of “rebuff,” I note, employ the past participle of the word (“rebuffed”). “Rebluffed” may be more likely to be a permutation of “rebuffed” and “rebluff” a more likely switch for “rebut.”

Examples with “rebluffed:”

Forum post: “Now do I go up to New Ager’s and others and call them Satanists? no. That would be untactful and considered unfriendly, and I would be rebluffed. ”

Web journal: “Each time I have asked to help you move back in you have rebluffed me and come up with excuses.”

Greece/Turkey forum:—- “akhbazian forces were rebluffed three times before the georgians were pushed into the gorge by russian forces”