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
Not to be trite, but I was just emitting a hacking cough which is one of the more charming features of the flu that’s currently kicking my ass, when it suddenly occurred to me to do a web search for “hackneyed cough’. (Another example of the corrosive influence of the Eggcorn Forum.) There were quite a few examples online, although many seemed to be wordplay.
Many eggcorns involve replacing an unfamiliar word with a more familiar one. This one (whether it’s an eggcorn or just an interesting substitution) starts with a puzzling, unfamiliar use of a familiar word, and replaces it with a less familiar word. If I were to attempt to make a case for eggcornicity here, I’d say the assumed meaning of hackneyed in this context is “another medical term, specific meaning unknown”, which is indeed how most people experience most medical terms.
When Benton was twenty- five years old he had the hackneyed cough, the sweats and the other symptoms of that dread consumption which had killed his father…
medical book
Since the first breath that mankind put together in some wheezy hackneyed cough to form a word there have been segues.
podcast description
He should occasionally emit a phlegm-filled hackneyed cough.
discussion
Even when I did get air, it was peppered with dust particles and these coated my airbags, provoking a hackneyed cough and scratching my windpipe.
blog
Offline
It does get old, coughing.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline
I’ll accept it (the eggcorn, not the cough).
Runs the other way, too:
Game forum: “Nintendo would never use a kind of hacking phrase for a game. Like Zelda 2.1 or Tetris 2a etc etcâ€
Hacker bulletin board: “make some stupid hacking phrase up like all pwds are pwnedâ€
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
kem wrote:
Hacker bulletin board: “make some stupid hacking phrase up like all pwds are pwnedâ€
That last example could just be a reference to computer hacking. Otherwise, your point is well taken.
Offline
True. I don’t see enough examples of the hackneyed -> hacking to be confident that it has been taken up into vocabularies. About all we can say is “it’s out there, by hook or crook.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
kem wrote:
I don’t see enough examples of the hackneyed -> hacking to be confident that it has been taken up into vocabularies.
Which raises the question (don’t worry; I won’t say “begs the question” in this context, LOL!): regarding any possible eggcorn, what number of (more or less unambiguous) examples should we require? And, would the number differ for different potential eggcorns?
I’ve always heard that the more or less arbitrary sample size needed to take a scientific study seriously is 30. Maybe the same for unambiguous, non-redundant eggcorn examples?
Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2016-03-26 17:51:56)
Offline
Always hard to know about these low-frequency eggcorn candidates, isn’t it? My own feeling is that, if we are just relying on web examples, we need about a dozen to raise the reliability enough to rule out what Pat called WTF eggcorns.
There are lots of caveat scrutator clauses, of course. Each example has to be looked at to see whether it might be a pun. Anything that is on Yahoo Answers can be jettisoned. Respellings that have plausible reasons for the respellings (anticipation errors, near-key typos, etc) need more proof than more implausible respellings. First-person testimonies (“I used to say Xx, but now I realize it is Xâ€) add authority. OCR renditions have to be checked in the image.
More trust can be placed in published (but not subsidy- or self-published) sources, since they have presumably been reviewed by the author and passed through an external editing phase. That’s why the Google Ngram database and Google Books and the various edited corpuses at byu.edu are so important. Their citations of an eggcorn carry more weight.
Won’t bore you with the math, but a dozen web citations probably represents about a thousand people who have adopted the eggcorn into their vocabulary.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
kem wrote:
Anything that is on Yahoo Answers can be jettisoned.
Pardon my ignorance, but why? And would this principle apply to all Q&A sites? And, if only some such sites, what would be the distinguishing criterion?
OCR renditions have to be checked in the image.
OCR? Uh…Obsessive-Compulsive Reading”? Or…? Jargon clarification, please.
Offline
OCR—Optical Character Recognition. Most of the pre-1970s books that are on the web have been turned into digital format via OCR. Google has done most of them. Google doesn’t always let you see the whole book (especially not if it is post 1920 and under copyright). But even the snippets they give as part of the hit citations are suspect—they have been derived via OCR.
Yahoo Answers attracts goaders. Like Emily Litella, Gilda Rader’s character on Saturday Night Live, certain submitters pose issues and ask questions that contain malaprops. The question “What is a pre-Madonna?†for example, occurs many, many times on Yahoo Answers. What seems to be happening here is the Hollywood Squares effect, with questioners hoping to sucker pompous responders into accepting the assumptions in their their bogus questions. (When we find examples in the questions on Yahoo Answers, our response should be the same as Emily’s curt answer to her SNL correctors: “never mind.â€)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline