Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
This one’s a toughie to track down. Good luck to others who might try. Let’s just say from personal experience I used to hear/understand “refurnished” whenever someone actually said “refurbished,” and it was probably many years before I noted the distinction. To “refurbish” means to renovate. And, if one is talking about refurbishing apartments, it might actually involve refurnishing! So, it’s very easy for a person unfamiliar with the more sophisticated term to simply mishear and misinterpret it.
The only other way I might track down this eggcorn is to locate another firsthand account where someone discusses the very same mixup. So far I haven’t turned up any such discussion when placing “refurnish” and “refurbish” into the same Google query.
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It’s a reinterpretation of a word (furbish) that is not used in common discourse, into a more common one, which seems to be the source of many eggcorns.
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