Eggcorn Forum

Nice find. It was reported (though not much analyzed or discussed) here .
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(Go to any Eggcorn Database —not unfortunately Eggcorn Forum— page and use the second search mechanism in the righthand column —the Google search— to paw through both Database and Forum for previous mentions of an eggcorn candidate. But finding one doesn’t mean say nothing; many could benefit from more careful analysis.)
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But surely your Facebooker was not thinking of the margaritas relaxing on the beach. I can think of slightly more plausible interpretations, but none of them is terribly convincing to me. (Do I yearn for x as for a pension? Is x my future, as a pension is?) It thus seems likely enough to be more a classical malapropism, motivated by the phonological (and orthographical) similarity and familiarity of the target rather than by misunderstanding of the source.
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In other words, the perp very probably just thinks of “a strong inclination” as a further meaning of the already-known pension (such inexplicable odd meanings are common enough in our bizarre lexicon: cf. pension “hotel”), rather than thinking of the money regularly paid to one who is retired and somehow working that meaning into the target meaning. Possibly enough a silicism (spell-checker or other computer-induced error) is involved.
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I googled it just to confirm its occurrence elsewhere, and at the top of the list was an enjoyable discussion at a blog called You Knew What I Meant: Errors and Intentions . Do any of you know that blog? It seems right down our allies, soda speak.

But all of this ignores the true delight of the error. The idea behind this blog has been not only to try to understand the intellectual activity behind the student’s mistake, but also to show the kinds of distracting notions that interpose themselves between the writer’s intention and the reader’s comprehension. In this economic climate, at least for a writing instructor laboring in the hardscrabble vineyards of part-timer-dom, my student’s sentence achieves a poignancy, a poetry, that transports one into a world of revealing truths.
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Yes, I have a fantasy pension. Or, receiving a pension from my current employers when I dodder off into the sunset is a fantasy. Or, my only pension after all these years is my finely honed gift for fantasy. I have fantasy for a pension.

Lovely!
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And, welcome, Dan!

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2015-09-27 01:33:05)