Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I was taking an online quiz about local dialects, and encountered something like this:
83. What do you call an easy course? a. gut (14.65%) b. crypt course (0.41%) c. crip course (4.98%)...
survey
This led me to investigate further.
During the 1920s, “crip†became a slang synonym for “easy,†both in sports and in collegiate registers: a “baseball crip†was an easy pitch, while a “crip course†was an easy course in school.
disability studies
A brief discussion of “crip” in this sense is here, and here are a couple more examples:
Athletes have taken crip courses to stay eligible to play for years.
What’s a crip course?
That’s easy. They’re easy courses even a dunce can pass… even get an A without showing up for class.
newspaper article
So if you’re looking for a crip course to take as a sophomore, I do not recommend AP Bio. Not every sophomore can handle taking AP classes.
Q&A site
And then there’s “crypt course”:
When one begins the study of the Bible the tendency is to get discouraged because the study of the Bible is not a crypt course.
dogma
I learned pretty much nothing—a crypt course if you ask me… Seibert is cool though.
professor rating site
...graduated many, many years ago; but, whatever happened to terms like Rocks for Jocks (Geology 101), Stars (Astronomy 101) and the generic Crypt course which was so easy a dead man could pass it?
discussion thread
I reckon “crip”, short for “cripple”, predates “crypt” in this sense, and it’s certainly more common. “Crypt” as an eggcorn of “crip” makes some sense, as explained in that last example above.
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“Crib course” is also attested, “1960s+” according to Cassel’s, and is the first of these variants I actually heard. If “crip” goes back to the 1920s, this suggests eggcornicity as well—reinterpreted as a course for which you might as well already have a crib sheet.
Last edited by JChance (2015-12-30 10:52:58)
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Perhaps “crib course” is a riff on “crib sheet.” The slang “crib sheet,” attested from the 1940s, is probably based on a pun—a piece of paper used to help the hopeless reminded speakers, on the basis of both its utility for immature learners and its palmable size, of the small sheets employed on children’s beds.
It is certainly plausible, though, that the earlier “crip course” mutated into “crib course.” The author of this book on slang proposes just such an eggcornical move.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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