Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
A busbar is, I believe, a thick strip of copper used for electrical distribution and ‘bus’ is short for (like the vehicle) “omnibus”. However nearly everyone in the UK constuction industry ( including consulting electrical engineers) calls them “BUZZ” bars- and they do buzz-probably at 50 Hz.
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I’ve found an example:-
I had David one-to-one for a while. He’s very talented but he’s over-confident, making silly mistakes. When I told him that he had left the copper ‘buzz bar’ out of the fuse box he stormed off. But you can’t just storm off when you feel like it.
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In eveyone’s computer, there is a common connection called a data bus, and in the mainframe world, there are even bus drivers. Whether the common connector is always known as a bus in electrics as opposed to digital electronics, I don’t know, but the similarity seems too coincidental. In which case, I would submit that “buzz” bar is the eggcorn – and a splendid one it is too.
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