Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
We have seen “gristly” for “grizzly” and “grizzly” for “grisly”. Now here’s a variation I encountered recently. There are lots of these.
I look at the gristly scene with growing horror.
story
the skull faced rob throwing the boomerangs was a gristly scene in the manga.
nerd talk
The blood and brains were an unsightly mess, and the shallow cries of that unfortunate woman made for a very gristly scene.
story
She pumped the accelerator and started the car, after letting the engine warm, she put it into gear and hurriedly put as many miles as she could between herself and the gristly scene that she had just left.
story
Eggcorn, sez I. A grisly scene is quite likely to have some gristle in it.
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“Gristly” and “grisly” would be flounder eggcorns.
The problem with almost all flounder eggcorns, of course, is that both words in the pair are lexicalized. It is always possible that the writers/speakers in the examples above really did mean that the scene was full of gristle. The idiomatic quotient of “grisly scene” is high enough, however, to cast some suspicion on any example with “gristly scene.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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