Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
Is there such a thing as a syntactic eggcorn? One that I saw today, and remembered that I’d seen in the past, turns up in contracts sometimes:
Fair, wear and tear
It’s meant to be:
Fair wear and tear
That is, the “fair” is meant to be an adjective which modifies “wear and tear”. In the eggcorn version, “fair” is turned into another noun in a list. I think this is particularly tempting because of the rhyme pattern.
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