Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
My cousin is a sweet lady who seems to have a knack for choosing the most logical-yet-wrong spelling EVERY TIME. Today she wrote on social media “Family must be looked at thru a collide-a-scope of Love, forgiveness, perseverance, patience, and long-suffering.” Her genealogy research was stalled because her grandparents were buried in poppers’ graves and had no tune-stones. Last Thanksgiving, her kids got to pull the witch bone. She used to have a Dolberman Pincher.
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Welcome to the forum, Lee. I’m afraid collide-a-scope has a couple of mentions already – try possibles in the search box at the top of this page, or google it + eggcorn. I find that most of the possible eggcorns I encounter are already somewhere in the forum, so please don’t be discouraged. As for the others, I’m having difficulty in seeing a plausible alternative meaning except, perhaps, for ‘witch-bone’ with its alternative route to the supernatural.
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Thanks for the contribution, Lee. There is some evidence that we do not all contribute equally to the pool of eggcorns. Certain speakers seem to have a knack for them. They are, if you like, our eggcorn super connectors.
We have discussed the insertion of collide into kaleidoscope here. I think it is an eggcorn. I’m not sure, though, about the other gems from your cousin. Eggcorns are established nonstandard substitutions for similar-sounding or similar-looking words/phrases that offer new and plausible meanings for the words/phases that are replaced. The others slips from your cousin seem to come short of this definition in two ways. One, they may not be established in a speech community as an alternate phrasing. It would be worth researching the slips to see if they are more than one-offs; that is, that they have found a home in a restricted speech community. Two, I’m not sure that the meanings of the new terms have any mappings onto the meanings of original terms. How, for example, are tombstones like tunestones?
I wonder, though, about “popper’s grave.” It does seem to have been adopted by a number of speakers. Could these speakers be rationializing the change in terms of “popping in?” Are pauper’s graves burial places where we pop poor people into hastily dug graves?
Last edited by kem (2015-06-03 10:22:25)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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“Witch bone” for “wishbone” seems like a plausible eggcorn to me. However, my preliminary web search for variations including “witch bone”, “witch-bone” and “witchbone” have not yielded any results that weren’t just puns.
Anyhow, welcome, Lee!
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