Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to
The forum administrator reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.
Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I noticed this potential eggcorn while browsing the City-Data forums. Google searches for “cast off the yoke” and “cast off the yolk” yielded 9,620 and 161 hits, respectively. Similarly, google searches for “oppressive yoke” and “oppressive yolk” yielded 12,100 and 328 hits, respectively. I have two examples of eggcorn-ish usage, and one example involving eggnog recipies where the incorrect usage was a deliberate play on words.
”...Is Iowa a place where blacks can shrug off the oppressive yolk of intolerance and discrimination…”
Dec 08
City-Data Forums
http://www.city-data.com/forum/iowa/523 … -iowa.html
”...people yet who still wants to cast off the yolk of state control…”
Aug 08
Southern Records Forum
http://www.southern.com/southern/forum/ … p?pid=8960
”...Don’t just settle for a quart of nog at home – cast off the yolk of commercial eggnog and concoct your own…”
Dec 07
Gothamist Food Section
http://gothamist.com/2007/12/01/egg_nog_month_g.php
Regarding the question of this being a true eggcorn, meaning the person using the eggcorn actually thinks that their usage of the word is correct: I think it is feasable that the user has an image of a person trying to rid themselves of a big, nasty, sticky yolk that has been hampering their free movement. Maybe.
Offline
Welcome to the forum, rsmccli. I suspect that if there is any eggcornish imagery it might be within the egg itself – the sense of sharing that tiny ovoid space with another – rather than trying (fruitlessly in my case) to envisage a tyrannical orange blob which needs to be somehow overthrown. Or the essential clagginess of eggyolk could also be useful; pigment mixed with egg-yolk adheres readily and dries quickly and permanently in tempera painting, and a recorded method of nobbling an adversary in 16th c. combat was to fill his scabbard with egg-yolk overnight – the following morning he would be unable to withdraw his sword – sword and scabbard would be literally yolked together:
He merely needs to produce a bible and read the words: let no man break apart what has been yolked together (my words). For two reasons she’ll bolt. ...
... of football and sex are destined to be yolked together in a symbiotic pas de deux – a bit like air and petrol in the chamber of a carburettor. ...
One’s enemies are kept close, their fortunes yolked to yours. Ideally they altogether cease to be enemies as the national project moves forward, ...
1 Oct 2007 … A language that is yolked to the brain is a language that has deep structures. Chomsky from wikipedia: [29]. This is the universalist theory …
Fa (Robert) Matthews and Billy Brown sowing oats three draught horses Gyp, Royal and Johnny Lark yolked to ploughshare (seed drill) April 1918 [picture] ...
In the Bible it is said that you are yolked to your parents until u are yolked to your husband. just think about how the yolk works but most importantly, ...
Yet part of what makes these bands interesting is the way they’re inextricably yolked to genre, and whether or not they’re capable of moving beyond it. ...
Last edited by Peter Forster (2009-01-15 12:26:08)
Offline
Personally, I would not have seen a semantic connection between yolk and an oppressive yoke, but I think rmccli makes a plausible argument. Nice job. And as Peter’s examples show, the use of yolked to mean closely associated – as two animals joined with a yoke would be – is clearly abroad.
I think we have to conclude that this is a real eggcorn for at least some users.
The tougher trick is to devise some sort diagnostic for uses that reflect the true eggcorn, versus those which reflect semantically empty pails. (Though of course I know that this is the Eggcorn Forum, and not the Immensely Challenging But Ultimately Not That Illuminating Linguistic Problems Forum.)
Offline
Looks like a pail to me. A two-way pail-thousands of ghits for “egg yoke.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
I’ve got to agree with Kem on this one. With two very common exact homophones, widespread mutual substitution is inevitable. I think the justifications offered so far are darned clever, but probably rather more ingenious than what was going through the heads of users. But if someone can show me clearly serious instances of, say, “a sulphurous yolk of oppression” or “finally shrugged off the sticky yolk of our arachnid overlords,” or something similar, I might have to change my mind.
Offline
patschwieterman wrote:
But if someone can show me clearly serious instances of, say, “a sulphurous yolk of oppression” or “finally shrugged off the sticky yolk of our arachnid overlords,” or something similar, I might have to change my mind.
This one looks serious to me, but it may be a pun that is simply lost on me. The essay, a reflection on 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers,” refers to such unions as “scrambled eggs”.
Do Not Be Yoked Together With Unbelievers? What does that mean? It means if you take an egg and mix the white with the yoke, you’re going to get a scrambled egg.
http://www.helium.com/items/737914-bein … ally-yoked
Here’s another piece referencing, among other Bible versus, 2 Corinthians 6:14 (here cited as “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers,”) that uses the image of an egg to explain the Trinity. It’s far less clear that this author sees the “yoke” of 2 Corinthians as the “yolk” of the egg, but she does use the <yolk> spelling five times, and the <yoke> spelling twice in the sense of yoked together, and <yoke> once to mean “the yellow center [of an egg].”
http://www.peaceinthefire.com/todaymessage_ar.cfm?id=8
I also find 1,510 rGh for {“Corinthians 6:14” egg}, though most of them seem to be discussions or warnings about Easter eggs as non-Christian ritual.
Offline
Nilep—Both of your passages are pretty interesting. I think the first one is clearly the strongest. I am convinced the writer is serious, and she does manage to bring together the ideas of egg yolks and yoking coherently in her interpretation of the passage. This might well change my mind if I could be convinced that this wasn’t a fairly unusual case. But I think that her metaphorical melange works far better for the Corinthians passage than it would for just about any of the contexts in which one normally encounters the phrase.
You seem to consider the second passage more problematic, and I do too. Though yoking and egg yolks are both explicitly discussed in different parts, the writer never links them in a way that indicates she sees a connection. And her use of both spellings—even if they’re randomly deployed throughout—may be an indication that she’s well aware she’s dealing with two different things. It’s fascinating, but doesn’t tell us much of use for this question. Off the topic, I was also interested in her use of the phrase “a man of interest” for someone a relative was thinking of marrying. When I hear “man of interest,” I’m thinking “Dept. of Homeland Security” or some such thing.
Offline
“The grim circumstances don’t change Harris’ overarching objective: to methodically yolk Pence to the Trump administration’s months of failures to contain the virus, zeroing in on his role as chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force”
From Politico
Not seeing the eggcorn
Last edited by JuanTwoThree (2020-10-06 12:30:35)
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
Offline