Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
I searched the forums and didn’t find any other example of this. A student of mine wrote about a character being “out in a boat”, when there was no mention of any boat in the reading passage. I was completely stumped until I realized he must have meant “out and about”. I wonder now if he considers this some kind of figurative idiom? And I wonder if this one would only be likely to pop up here in Canada, with our infamous Canadian raising.
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Good one, Chandra! Unfortunately, I can’t figure out a way to google “out in a boat” is such a way as to screen out the flood of actual boat references from the eggcornical use of the term, so can’t determine if it’s been used that way by someone other than your student.
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Oh yeah! Excellent! A boat time we found that one!
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(Another example of the prolific in/and confusion.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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