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
I see “diseased” for “deceased” has come up before but I quite liked it in this combination:
“Stairs snake up to bricked off and boarded up rooms, through which only the spirits of long-diseased residents can pass.” Have also found other occurrences such as “long-diseased ancestor”
It is also an example of an eggcorn that can occur in contexts where it is quite correct, as in “long-diseased tissue” in medical writing.
Offline
You’re seeing it clearly, sounds like, rostox. (And, btw, welcome to the forum!)
.
Just to say explicitly what is implicit in several of the posts about it: this is amusing, but even when it is a standardized error (if it ever is) it is unlikely to be fully eggcornish. Perps are quite unlikely to mean, in the contexts where it shows up, “sick, but not (yet) deadâ€.
.
It is possible, of course, that they have extended the semantics of diseased to the logical limit, i.e. till the patient is actually dead, but if so, that is a bit of a different thing from a standard eggcorn. In normal usage there is such a strong opposition between diseased (or other kinds of sick ) and dead that such a development would be anomalous and an appeal to it gratuitous (or dubitional, or dubicious, or whatever the appropriate adjective is).
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline