Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
Googling “poker dot” throws up a lot of gaming sites, as well as people using the phrase instead of “polka dot”. Using eBay it’s easy to remove that factor and find plenty of people using “poker dot” to describe the pattern.
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As someone who, when a small child, used to burn dots into pieces of wood with a hot poker, sounds like an eggcorn to me – though the dots on poker dice probably have the most influence on this coining … I see wikipedia derives the term polka dot from the dance. Fewer and fewer people today, I suspect, will have heard of the polka (from Czech pulka, “half-step”m the OED says), giving that important background to the coining of an eggcorn, an unfamiliarelement in a common expression.
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