Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I have heard several instances of “off my own back” lately. If I had known about this forum earlier I would have noted time & speaker!
It seems to me that the users are unaware of the cricketing origin of the metaphor.
– Frank LittleOffline
Welcome, Frank! Member Jude posted on “off one’s own back” on August 21 of this year, and Sandi gave a brief response in which she mentioned the use of the phrase in New Zealand. It’s a lengthy post, so I’ll provide just the URL here:
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … p?pid=1317
I recently noticed that this phrase had been added to the list of examples of eggcorns in the Wikipedia “eggcorn” article. While not perfect, the article’s decent, and I’d disagree with only 2-3 of the examples they have there.
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This is so common and harmless that I now count the “back” version as acceptable dialect/idiolect.
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