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#1 2014-01-04 12:56:46

CatherineR
Eggcornista
Registered: 2006-08-09
Posts: 61

"chip wreck" for "shipwreck"

From a student essay: “Odysseus’s ship became chip wreck.” Makes sense to me—it was so wrecked there was nothing left but chips.

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#2 2014-01-04 14:44:52

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

Re: "chip wreck" for "shipwreck"

Really funny. Perhaps nothing more than a misspelling, though. It’s almost impossible to dig up any web documentation showing others making this mistake—searches for “chipwreck” turn up mostly puns (Alvin the Chipmunk, potato chip breaks, poker losses). In addition, the lean is not quite right. The perp has taken a really common word, “ship,” that presumably everyone is familiar with, and substituted for it a lower frequency “chip.”

Last edited by kem (2014-01-04 19:38:49)


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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#3 2014-01-04 16:49:21

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2713
Website

Re: "chip wreck" for "shipwreck"

I love it. A student essay is not an ambiance where you expect wordplay, is it? (Or what kind of essay was it, Catherine?) I’d tend to think the student would have done it with tongue restricted to the oral cavity, in which case it might well be an eggcorn.
.
(Be interesting to see, for modern-day college —or is it high school?— students, how much more common ship meaning ‘boat’, as opposed to ‘send for delivery elsewhere’, is than chip with the meaning ‘little bit/piece of something’. The latter has got to be pretty common, too.)


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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#4 2014-01-04 19:43:56

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

Re: "chip wreck" for "shipwreck"

The noun “chip” is about 14 times less frequent in English than the noun “ship:” https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c … ip%3B%2Cc0


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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#5 2014-01-05 00:07:18

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2713
Website

Re: "chip wreck" for "shipwreck"

Wow! I did not think my intuitions would be that far out of whack! 14 times is a lot. And even with computer chips and all. It is in books, where I would expect the notion of ships to be bigger than in conversation. I should check out a conversational database, I reckon.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2014-01-05 00:09:41)


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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