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 just encountered this one on Fark, and decided to look it up – and sure enough, there are 188 hits for “zest pool” on Google… a few of them being people who take themselves seriously, not just forums.
Offline
“Zest pool” must be a reshaping of cesspool. I could understand an intentional alteration, but I’d really have to see some examples to be convinced that it’s ever an eggcorn.
Offline
Like Jorkel, I was pretty skeptical: adding a “t,” voicing an “s” sound—those aren’t typical eggcorn-type changes. (Which reminds me that we rarely talk about what kind of sound changes we do find likely when we go eggcorn-hunting.) But a healthy number of the hits don’t obviously look like puns. Here’s an example:
The place is a PIT!! it’s a zest pool of bad service, cold food, dirty restrooms and lazy employees.
http://local.yahoo.com/details?id=11988718
This person’s pretty mad about service and food at a restaurant in Hershey, PA, and there’s nothing else in the message to suggest they’re trying to be funny. In fact, calling Friendly’s Restaurant a “cesspool” would have had more impact than “zest pool,” so I think it’s authentic.
More likely to be a malapropism than an eggcorn though—hard to see what’s zesty about a bad restaurant.
Offline
Could this be an “autospellcheck” error – someone types “cess pool” as two words and the spellcheck changes cess to zest?
Offline
Not my spellchecker, at any rate: it didn’t flag “zest pool”; and it only flagged “zestpool”—it didn’t provide any options.
Offline