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
This is a new one: A friend of mine left me a voice mail in which she urged me to join her in publicly expressing “distaint” for a local politician. That word was not found in any of the scores of dictionaries accessed by the OneLook site, though the Urban Dictionary has it as a synonym for “hate”. In context, my friend clearly meant “disdain”. It seems quite eggcornish, with the very similar pronunciation and the meaning connection through such possible unconscious intermediaries as “taint” and “stain”. But careful perusal of 100 of the 820 Google hits for “distaint” yielded no clear eggcornish examples; most of the hits were simply misspellings of “distant”. However, the Urban Dictionary citation indicates that my friend isn’t the only one to use this term. So, I guess it’s an eggcorn, but a rare one. Have any of you ever seen/heard this one?
Offline
Think you’ve got a live one, Dixon. You can find many more examples by searching for distaint for: Almost all of these hits are substitutions for “disdain for.”
David T has discussed distain << disdain on the Forum.
Last edited by kem (2013-01-21 14:23:39)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
Distain is extremely common. The addition of a taint is indeed an interesting and potentially eggcornish difference.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline