Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I was finishing up a marathon dish washing session w/my nine year old daughter. She was standing over the sink with all the dishes. I exasperatedly said, “I’m so over all these dishes.” She replied, ” So am I, Littleary! It’s kind of a tongue twister. You really have to think about it to say it wrongly, right. (Yogiism?) I thought it was cute b/c she’s little and created this malapropism that i thought might qualify for an egghorn. But what the hell do I know?
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Very charming! I wish now that I had started marking somehow all the similar examples of eggcornish things said by kids—there’s a good number of them on the forum, but they’re pretty much impossible to find. (There was another cute one submitted today by egurowitz.)
These days, we usually consider an eggcorn to be something that has started to acquire a certain limited currency, so I’m not sure anymore how one-off coinages fit into the larger eggcornish scheme of things.
How many dishes do you need to wash to achieve marathon status? 26?
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I too love the way kids reshape the language. Though I’m not entirely sure how I would categorize “little-ary” vis-a-vis “literary.” (I think tongue twister was mentioned). One hurdle for eggcorn status is for the reshaping to make some contextual sense; If there is some way that the word “little” is truly intended, then it could be an eggcorn. But I can’t find a way to construe “little” in the midst of such a large task! Charming story however.
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