Eggcorn Forum

“Run, run, as fast as you can;

You can’t catch me, I’m a Ninja-bred man!”
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At least that was what I heard one of my grandsons saying a couple of days ago.
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This may be the type of eggcorn that is born (or spends some of its infancy) as a pun. Perhaps somebody first said it as a simple pronunciation mistake or an eggcorn, but somebody (else?) realized that it was not only funny but commercially viable; Ninja-bread men are available for sale in stores and over the Internet. They even offer cookie cutters of effigious people in ninja poses, read-aloud versions of the story, and so forth. My daughter-in-law thought my grandkids might have seen or heard such usages and thus this was not an original error of theirs, though it might well have been anyway.
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For them and probably most users, the rather abstruse word bred is probably not in mind, but it came to my mind as part of a perfectly appropriate re-analysis, and it may be there in someone’s mind. It does occur, though not often, on the Internet. It may of course also just be a misspelling of bread, and that meaning is what is in their minds.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2018-11-24 16:40:10)