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Chris -- 2018-04-11
A dog breeder in WV suggested dusting dog droppings with “canine pepper” to discourage corporphagia (eating feces). After grilling the breeder for clarity of this curious condiment, I came to realize she meant “cayenne pepper.”
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Cool—this may be a case of misanalysis. There are lots of hits on the Web for “canine pepper spray,” and it’s generally clear that the writers intend this to mean “a pepper spray intended to be used against canines.” Your dog breeder seems to have heard the full phrase “canine pepper spray” and assumed that it was a spray “made of canine peppers.” After that, canine peppers apparently didn’t need the spray to take on a life of their own.
I hope it won’t seem rude of me to be interested in “corporphagia.” I bet you mean “coprophagia.” But “corpophagia” is kinda eggcornish in its own right —it sounds like eating part of the body. And it gets over 300 ghits. It mixes together Latin and Greek roots, but then again there are standard English terms that do that, too.
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Yeah, I meant “corPROphasia, not POR... thanks for catching that, it was a PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair) error.
As for the “canine pepper” pronunciation I encountered, the breeder was obviously running a puppy mill (my then-wife selected this breeder, 750 miles from home, one way)—we had to meet the breeder at a Burger King off a main highway, she was always late (we got two dogs from her—both separate ‘round trips—loooong story), each dog was flea-infested… Anyway, this lady was nun two bright (non to bright? Eggcorns in ten did), so I’m guessing she really didn’t know the pronunciation of “cayenne.” I doubt she ever saw the spice name on a spice-jar label.
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