Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
A common verbal mistake that I can’t find any reference to on this site is the morphing of “in specific” to “in pacific”, or from “specifically” to “pacifically” (or any other phonetically identical misspelling).
It would seem that this verbal mistake comes about initially through slight speech impediment, but is probably then shared amongst peer groups. However, I haven’t found too much evidence of this written form of the mistake, except for examples where the writer is intentionally playing on this well-known example:
E.g. http://www.projectopus.com/node/2341
However, this absence of a written use of “pacific” in the place of “specific” is probably due to the fact that the name “Pacific” is known well enough that this error is immediately spotted.
This is not the case when the writer spells the word differently, as in “pasifically”. A google search turns up many wonderful examples of this.
e.g. “the website it said it was pasifically made for gmax,”
From my understanding, this should be considered an eggcorn. What do y’all think?
David
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This seems more likely to be a malapropism to me. It would be an eggcorn only if it were clear that the writers understood what “pacific” usually means and that they were rationalizing the word’s presence in this phrase. But I can’t find a way of plugging the usual meaning of “pacific” back into the phrase and getting something that still makes sense.
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Yes, a malapropism rather than a eggcorn. My dad used to say it all the time, probably due to a minor speech impediment as suggested above. ‘Specific’ is a harder word to say than ‘pacific’, which has a fairly obscure meaning (apart from the ocean) so why not just say that instead?
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