Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
I told my spouse about this forum and she told me of a high school girlfriend who wrote “little own” for “let alone”. Not sure if that’s an eggcorn or not, since it seems to be based only on a mis-hearing and doesn’t make any other logical sense that I can figure out.
What thinkest all y’all? ;-)
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It’s a fairly common switch. Paul Brians lists it as one of the common English errors.
“Little own” << “let alone” is mentioned on the Eggcorn Database as one of the variants of the “little lone” eggcorn. As Chris points out there, the operative word is “little,” which does seem to have some semantic move that resemble “let alone.”
The phrase “let alone” and its cousin “not to mention” are grammatically peculiar. First of all, they contradict themselves. We say that we are not going to mention or touch on something, and then we do it. Second, they don’t fit well with the standard part-of-speech categories. What we put after these phrases are not full clauses, just nouns (or sometimes adjectives or verbs). I suppose we could call them “conjunctions.” They don’t cover the full range of the roles played by conjunctions such as “and” and “or,” though. If we had to come up with a new name for the grammatical category represented by “let alone” and “not to mention,” we might call them “list extenders.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Huh, I missed it on my browse of the Database! Sorry!
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ladysun1969 wrote:
Huh, I missed it on my browse of the Database Sorry
No biggie.
The best way to search this site is to use the second search field on the Eggcorn Database page, the field marked “Google Search”.
Welcome to the Eggcorn Forum!
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