Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
@smurffingerrecordbox and I will be slinging a varitable cornucopia of deals and steals
some countries/communities are trying to clamp down, foreseeing a varitable Pandora’s Box.
A varitable banquet of double action piercings from our Vicar lane studio Leeds city centre
The Varitable Rainbow of Song—Album
Life is a collection of memories and from that collection we paint a varitable tapestry of our being here on earth.
A varitable banquet of double action piercings from our Vicar lane studio
Bob and Darolyn shared a love of animals, together they created a varitable zoo of dogs, cats and horses.
“Varitable” for “veritable” is undoubtedly just a spelling mistake in most cases, and many examples are not easy to construe as eggcornous.
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But nouns like “cornucopia”, “Pandora’s box”, ” tapestry”, “banquet” and “rainbow” give room for variation to occur in the mind. In fact fairly often when we say “A veritable N1 of N2”, N1 is some sort of a collective noun, allowing if not implying variations among the members of the collective.
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Sounds likely to be an eggcorn to me, if the perps are actually thinking of variation instead of verity and if the spelling and construal are standard for them.
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fwiw, there are plenty of cases of varify < verify, varitation < variation, varitable < variable, and other related spellos/malapropisms.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2025-04-21 18:18:18)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Perhaps. The main use of “veritable” in modern English is as a metaphor intensifier. “A veritable X of Y,” where X is a metaphor, usually a provocative one, for Y. All of your examples fit this usage, suggesting that the authors were thinking “veritable” when writing “varitable.”
Here’s what the eminent authority Microsoft Copilot says:
It looks like “varitable” might just be a misspelling of “veritable” rather than a true eggcorn… In the case of “varitable,” there isn’t much evidence that people commonly use it in place of “veritable” with a mistaken but logical reasoning behind it. Instead, it seems to pop up as a typo or misprint, especially in discussions about old French knives.
Last edited by kem (2025-04-22 09:50:33)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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