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Chris -- 2018-04-11
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/ … -headlines
”’He was the pillow, rock and glue of his family,’ said Courtney Speed, a beautician from Dundalk who said that she had known King since the 1960s.”
Used intentionally as a book title, “Pillow of the Community”, featuring New Jersey hardboiled detective Ezelle “Easy” Barnes:
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I thought this one looked familiar. Check the eggcorn forum for…
pillow of strength by CatherineR Contribute! 0 2006-08-09 05:31:37 by CatherineR
It seems those who come to the website lately are at a distinct disadvantage since so many eggcorns have already been found. Even so, nice find: your first quote provides an interesting example of its usage.
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Thanks, jorkel!
I had searched the eggcorn database, and it’s not in there, but it is found in the forum search. I will look there in the future.
Maybe this will provide enough impetus to make it a database entry, though I had a surprisingly hard time finding examples via Google.
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Just a few Google counts (Oct. 10, 2006)...
4,570,000 “pillar of”
347,000 “pillow of”
The most common contexts where “pillar of” is used correctly are the following:
249,000 “pillar of salt”
138,000 “pillar of strength”
108,000 “pillar of the community”
51,200 “pillar of society”
25,300 “pillar of faith”
13,900 “pillar of sand”
Eggcorn usages are expected when replacing “pillar” with “pillow”...
58 “pillow of salt”
304 “pillow of strength”
18 “pillow of the community”
13 “pillow of society”
9 “pillow of faith”
130 “pillow of sand”
A few of these lists might be worth sorting through to locate genuine eggcorn usages. I would also look for variations like “pillow of his community” etc.
One final note on conducting Google searches: be sure to include the quotation marks around the words you’d like to keep clustered together. Happy hunting.
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