Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
It may be that unfamiliarity with that short very sharp cut nail called a tack lies behind this eggcornish interpretation, but certainly successful attacks need to be equally sharp and incisive. Oddly enough, being a nonagenarian seems unusually helpful in achieving such piercing strikes.
My father is 97 and still sharp as attack mentally.
Nussbaum is the oldest Equity actor on any stage and at 94 is as sharp as attack.
Although he couldn’t spend as many hours in the saddle, and his eyes and ears didn’t always respond to his demands, his mind was as sharp as attack.
You could go for days talking about his knowledge and still, to this day, he just turned 93 a couple weeks ago, still is sharp as attack.
Yeah, I talked to him today as a matter of fact, he’s 95, but he’s sharp as attack.
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Can’t believe we hadn’t caught that one! Congratulations, Peter.
fwiw I find I have it recorded since 2005 (just not labelled or reported as an eggcorn), with the following examples:
Debates on either side of the fences using wit as sharp as attack can lead to a page full of information
Sharp as attack I mean, a tack! Hey I didn’t mean to write it that way, really!
This was my new incarnation and it had to be sharp as attack. The smitten mirror stared like a schoolgirl
a “Hitchcockian kind of cat and mouse” game played by two cunning minds — one as sharp as attack and one as blunt as a sledgehammer.
One might prefer “blunt as defense” in that last example.
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We did catch here onsite the duel-edged sword (or jewel-edged sword, or dull-edged sword or too-edged sword or whatever it is), which is the other thing that things are proverbially as sharp as or sharper than.
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Related ones (not eggcorns, but entertaining): sharp as a trap, sharp as a cucumber, not the sharpest button on the tree . (I guess if you think of a toothed trap the first might aspire to eggcornish pretensions.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-07-08 11:14:06)
*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+
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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