Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
To my ear at least, ‘decrepit’ sounds like a mispronunciation, ending oddly and defying easy rhyme. Any rhyme at all, come to think of it. Assisting the poor creature by moving its rear end about to make it sound less strange seems a merciful act, though hardly a conscious one.
As for eggcornicity, all we have is crept, suggesting the feeble, weak and broken. Weak indeed.
The guy entered the stage with a limp, his voice was totally ####**, kinda like a decreptic old man struggling to stand on his feet.
... of beautiful Greek Revival buildings that was originally constructed as a home for “aged and decreptic seamen” in the late 19th century.
In short, I’m just an old boy who refused to shuffle into decreptitude.
The way I look at it is that when I am old and decreptit, I will want to spend cold winter evenings nostalgically going through the evidence …
They’d be a lot better if it wasn’t for the amount of sick and decrepted looking birds at them;you walk by some stalls and the smell, the birds gaping eyes …
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Wouldn’t decreptitude be the state in which you can no longer even creep? You shuffle (as the old boy you referred to suggested) until you have to creep, and decreptitude itself is not far away by that point.
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Seems like blending might be involved. Dyspeptic ?
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I keep thinking there is sure to be an Ogden Nash poem where he finds a rhyme for decrepit , something like “schlep it”, but it keeps schlepping itself away out of the corner of my memory.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Dyspeptic certainly supplies a more familiar ending as well as some suffering and a measure of irritability that decrepitude seems likely to involve.
Nash may have failed us, but perhaps there could be a Shakespearean Seven Ages where one who can leap and ballet-step it ends up limping and decrepit?
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