Eggcorn Forum

Justice hurts! Ooooh! (and the others)
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(Surely the hollow toeses were purposeful?)
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I like the figure of the doorman lying along the threshold.

Awesome list!

Kem said:

“Justice hurts” for “just deserts” would be among the best eggcorns of all time—if only it could be certified.

I can accept, just, and because I’ve little choice in the matter, that a solitary nonce/singleton/uniquecorn on its own is insufficient evidence of usage, but at what point is there sufficient evidence? After all, much of eggcornish misapprehension is tucked away in our heads, emerging occasionally in speech and perhaps even less often in written form. For me, this second example of David’s confers full eggcornhood and I agree with Kem that it’s a rarity of ostrich dimensions.

Two of the great ironies in our quest to find the eggcorns in the English language:

(1) The funniest eggcorn candidates (which often translates, in my ecosystem, into “the best eggcorn candidates”) require much better evidence than unfunny ones, because many of the examples may be puns.

(2) A confession by an eggcorner, the gold standard of eggcorn proof, is proof only for a previous eggcorn, since it comes when the confessor escapes from the community of those who use the eggcorn. A confession is not the proof of a current eggcorn, but the proof of a tendency to transform an acorn. The current use still needs to be documented.

kem wrote:

A confession is not the proof of a current eggcorn, but the proof of a tendency to transform an acorn. The current use still needs to be documented.

I’m not so sure about this. We don’t need a living, breathing dinosaur to establish that dinosaurs existed, and we still call them “dinosaurs” rather than “former dinosaurs” even though they’ve been gone for 66 million years. Even the best-established eggcorns are from the past, even if it’s just a few minutes in the past and, in principle, it’s possible that all eggcorn perps have learned that their usage was an eggcorn and stopped using it since the time they wrote or uttered the example that we have found. This doesn’t mean that it wasn’t an eggcorn, even though we have established its eggcornicity on a sort of fossil evidence. To call it an eggcorn tells us nothing about whether it’s still used as such, any more than calling something a plesiosaur tells us anything about whether it still lives. If you find some value in documenting current use for an eggcorn, that’s fine, but I’d say we can still call it an eggcorn once its eggcornicity has been established for some time in the past, just as we can call an archaic noun a noun even if no one is using it anymore. Once an eggcorn, always an eggcorn.

Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2018-01-21 17:26:58)

kem wrote:

Perhaps we should call these come-and-gone eggcorns “fossil eggcorns.” We have an army of English teachers and lexicographers trying to make all eggcorns into fossil eggcorns…

Of course, once an eggcorn is established as such, proving that no one is currently using it as an eggcorn is akin to “proving a negative”. Even if we could show that all UFO reports had prosaic explanations, we couldn’t prove that there are no UFOs landing somewhere right now, and even if we could extinguish all eggcorns through education (and we can’t!), we’d have no way of knowing that there’s not someone using one of them right now. This is a good reminder that eggcornology is a very uncertain enterprise.