Eggcorn Forum

We are in the middle of decadal celebrations for the Great Eggcorn Hunt. The term “eggcorn” had its tenth birthday last fall. This coming autumn, the Eggcorn Database will turn ten. The Eggcorn Forum reaches age ten next year.

It all began, of course, on September 23, 2003, when Mark Liberman puzzled over the neologism “egg corn” in one of his Language Log posts. Liberman ran through a list of possible figures of speech for this sort of error and found each to be wanting. A few days later, his colleague, Geoffrey Pullman, suggested that the newly discovered term should become the name of its own category. In the coming months, the phrase was mashed and “egg corn” became the now familiar “eggcorn.”

The Great Eggcorn Hunt spent its first year on Language Log, which had started up that summer on an old Linux box located at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. The first year of the Hunt was led by Log contributors Arnold Zwicky and Mark Liberman, with occasional horn blasts from Geoffrey Pullum. By the spring of 2004, Pullum was complaining that the number of posts on eggcorns made it difficult to index in a single entry. Others outside of Language Log—most notably, Chris Waigl on her Serendipity blog—began to help with the Hunt.

Chris, an IT professional, took the Great Eggcorn Hunt to a new level in late 2004 when she launched the Eggcorn Database site. Her first entry was the eggcorn “eggcorn.” Waigl and Zwicky, aided by Ben Zimmer, brought over to the new Eggcorn Database many of the older and ongoing Language Log captures. The Database soon became headquarters for the Hunt. Ken Lakritz showed up in February of the new year at the Comments section of the Eggcorn Database and quickly outpaced every other contributor in the sheer quantity of bagged eggcorns. By October of 2004, the new web site had logged its 500th eggcorn. Ken noted that “the next 500 may be more difficult, since we’ve already gathered the low-hanging fruit.” Similar statements would become an almost annual ritual at the Great Eggcorn Hunt.

In the fall of 2004, the Eggcorn Database had a two-tier structure. Anyone could join the website and make posts to the Comments section. A selected team, including Zwicky, Waigl, and Zimmer, scanned the Comments for new ideas and added them, along with discoveries from the Language Log and other sources, to the main entries in the Database. (The Wayback Machine gives us an early glimpse of the Eggcorn Database configuration from February of 2004.) It quickly became apparent that the Comments section was producing many more eggcorns than the loggers could transfer to the Database. The bare-bones Comments section, moreover, made it awkward to discuss individual suggestions. Waigl decided to move the Comments section to a full-fledged bulletin board.

Chris built the Eggcorn Forum on the punBB platform and launched it in October 2004. The Comments section of the Eggcorn Database was shut down the same month. That fall and through 2005, Ken Lakritz continued his impressive streak of discoveries on the new Forum. He was soon paced by Pat Schwieterman, who had shown up in the last days of the old Comments section. In 2006 the names Joe Krozel and Peter Forster began to appear with increasing frequency on the Eggcorn Forum. Eggcorn entries in the Eggcorn Database and eggcorn-themed posts to Language Log gradually declined. The Great Eggcorn Hunt had moved, for better or worse, to a new home in the Eggcorn Forum.

One way to find out about the thousands of eggcorns that have been discovered over the last decade is by making use of a web search engine. This sort of indexing, however, is not a great way to browse eggcorns, since it requires that searchers know what they are looking for. Some attempts have been made to provide browsable indexes to eggcorn collections. The Eggcorn Database entries have an alphabetical index that is accessible through the site’s main page. At the end of 2007, Ken Lakritz summarized the best eggcorns found in the Eggcorn Forum that year. I made an almost complete list of the Forum’s eggcorn candidates for 2008. Since 2009, David Bird and I have provided comprehensive yearly lists of eggcorn candidates proposed on the Forum. In all, about 4000 eggcorn candidates (I hesitate to call them “eggcorns”) have been indexed. Perhaps another 1500 eggcorn candidates, however, lack any kind of index. The first three years of the Eggcorn Forum entries, the ones from late 2005 to the end of 2007, are still unindexed (later insertion: the fourteen months of 2005 and 2006 posts are now indexed). Also unindexed are the eggcorns from the old Comments section that did not make it into the Eggcorn Database.

One of these deficiencies is now remedied. In the next post in this thread, I have provided an index to the eggcorns in the old Comments section that were not promoted to the Eggcorn Database. Some of these words and phrases, the ones that have been picked up for later discussion in the Eggcorn Forum, will be familiar, but not all of them have received subsequent attention. Which is unfortunate, because a few of them are pus jewels, eggcorn gems that plead for some kind of public display. Among the best, in my opinion, are:

plug-ends << plugins
holdster << holster
landblast << lambaste
affectionado << aficionado
eggnod << eggnog
fleebag << fleabag
ivory league << ivy league
rush and roulette << Russian Roulette
solopsism << solipsism
demigod << demagogue
chestfallen << crestfallen
inscissors << incisors
tankered of ale << tankard of ale
tic for tac << tit for tat
porkulent << corpulent
beautox << botox
parsimoney << parsimony
nicked and dimed << nickel and dimed
one trip pony << one trick pony
festal virgin << vestal virgin
white as a sheep << white as a sheet
empiric victory << Pyrrhic victory
eek out a win << eke out a win
cost a nominal leg << cost an arm and a leg
runt of the mill << run of the mill
restbite/restbit << respite
sick as hell anemia << sickle cell anemia
skim of my teeth << skin of my teeth
packed like saltines << packed like sardines

And now the full index, with clickable links:

Last edited by kem (2014-08-02 11:01:40)