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
It’s a fairly common error. There are actually more ghits of “tie him over until” (1220) than “tide him over until” (877.)
I’m not sure if I can venture a rationale. Are there other idioms besides “tie one on” that use tie?
Offline
“tie over” is in the database. as for idioms with tie: http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/tie ... is first search result on google for “tie idioms”. has among many others “fit to be tied” and “tie the knot”
Offline
FWIW, here’s the example I recently encountered:
Like, if that client going to pay on time or are we going to have to dig into the dwindling reserved yet again to tie us over?
Offline
I don’t know about anybody else, but this one has always awakened musical associations for me: a tie instructs you to carry a tone over into the next measure (or what-have-you), so tieing over means enabling to continue. Fits well. But I always simultaneous recognized this as a distortion of tide over ; if someone thought it was the standard form and gave it this meaning it would be a clear acorn.
.
Does anyone have the notion of a tie in sports which may prolong play (into a tie-breaker of some sort)?
.
(PS this is the Database entry: took me a bit to find it.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2013-12-10 11:20:33)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline