Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Hello, I was writing this morning and came across a passage where I’d written “fire powder” instead of “firepower,” and I thought it might be an eggcorn. It’s an old-fashioned war scene where guns would be loaded with gunpowder, so there was something that worked about it either way. I searched the database and did not see it.
I’m new to the forum so my apologies if I didn’t do this properly.
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Hi, Emily. Welcome to the Forum.
“Firepowder” for “firepower” is a possible eggcorn. Here’s someone else who made the same mistake.
It’s hard to find examples of this substitution on the web, however, because “firepowder” has become a mot du jour among the fantasy crowd, an antique-sounding term for gunpowder.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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A BBC Comedy piece on fb today had a piece on the Colombian game of tejo. Looks like a lot of fun. The local guide explained that the targets on the clay board are filled with gunpower. English is clearly not her first language, so it may be a question of pronunciation, but the expression is clearly apt. It would be easy to leave a letter out of gunpowder when typing, so I didn’t try to find other examples on the web.
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