Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
This is more of a “visual” eggcorn (do you have a term for that? Mis-reading a word rather than mishearing it). I always thought that the chemical used to make gunpowder was “saltpepper,” and others on the internet apparently do too:
Give the correct systematic name for saltpepper KNO3, soda ash Na2CO3, lime CaO, muriatic acid HCl, Epsom salt?
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/inde … 637AAkSrcm
Legend has it that fireworks were invented in a Chinese kitchen when the cook accidentally spilled saltpepper into the flame of a cooking fire. Lo and behold, saltpepper—a popular cooking spice about 2000 years ago—happens to be one of the key agents in gunpowder. And then along came a monk who wondered what might happen if he encased this earliest form of gunpowder within bamboo et voila: boom, pow, wow! Or as they said in the Chinese days of yore: Bian Pao! The moral of the story is: don’t worry if the recipes don’t come out exactly like our pictures or you add too much dill to the chicken salad. You never know—you might just end up with an explosive new dish. Bian Pao, yo!
http://soirtay.com/fourth-of-july-diy/set-yourself/
I suppose I also thought the combination of salt and pepper was somehow “explosive.” Something I did not know before is that saltpeter does have some culinary applications, like preserving meat.
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The term “eyecorn” has been used to these (as opposed to “earcorn”). We’ve seen a large number of them. “gutteral” (“guttural”), “inscents” (“incense”), “playwrite” (“playwright”), “allturnative” (“alternative”), etc.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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