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Chris -- 2025-05-10
I came across this today in the British Daily Express. Full context is “The damning statistic provides perfection ammunition to the Vote Leave camp less than a fortnight before the historic EU Referendum with campaigners saying the only way to regain control of our borders is to leave the EU project.”
It couldn’t just be a typo, could it, but might it be the result of autocomplete software? Or does it make some sort of eggcorny sense, i.e. ammunition that leads to a state of perfection?
A Google ” ” search throws up a mere 84 occurrences, and I can find none in COCA, GloWbE, NOW, or Ngrams.
Any thoughts?
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If you look closely at those Google hits, you’ll see that there are only two or three hits that could be taken as real examples.
Your autocomplete suggestion seems like a good one. A reporters filing stories from their tablets these days?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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It could be an anticipation error.
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