Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
Found this tweet: https://twitter.com/BryceElder/status/9 … 0546871296
Heard a guy talking about Belgian whistles.
“A basic website costs 10k, or 25k upwards if you want all the Belgian whistles,” he said.
Belgian whistles.
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Nice find! Never saw that one before.
Welcome to the Eggcorn Forum, lennoxec!
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Reported yesterday by Mark Liberman on the Language Log site, quoting somebody else. (Bryce Elder? I’m too ill-twitterate to figure out for sure.) It would be a very classy eggcorn, though given the nasty Urban Dictionary-type meanings, one has to wonder if it was an eggplant. (Lots of people think the grosser a phrase they can hide under a pun the cleverer they are.)
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Several other good ones were discussed in the comments, a number of which are already here. “Paystub artist” < “paste-up artist” (reported by Dick Margulis, with evidence it was somewhat standard) I think was not. Also the Shakespearean play A Fellow seemed a noteworthy Aunty Lehmann, if it’s really standard for anybody.
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I enjoyed the following interchange:
David L said,
December 6, 2017 @ 10:04 am
I wonder how many of these are generation by speech-to-text conversion…
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Mark Meckes said,
December 6, 2017 @ 10:50 am
I think they’re all generated by speech-to-text conversion. In most cases, that conversion was done by human beings.
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Ouch, but true.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2017-12-23 16:13:42)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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A pun. Perhaps even an eggplant, given that you can buy a T-shirt sporting the joke. Actual web evidence of people using this term as an eggcorn is mighty thin.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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