Eggcorn Forum

I finally figured out what you were talking about:
A “caret” (the insertion mark ”^”) may look like a carrot to some people.

I find that many eggcorns come about through people mishearing things and then having to find words which make sense to them when they come to write them down.
However, this is more likely to come from a person learning by reading – not unusual for technical geeks who like to pore over books rather than socialise with other people </stereotype>.
They mis-pronounce “caret” as “carett” which someone else then hears as “carrot” – a word they already know.

As an aside these are popular spoke terms amongst techies and programmers for some of the odder characters (for use when dictating commands or code to another). Some of these may be used as shibboleths – if you don’t read them correctly or if you have to ask when you hear them you stand out as a non-tech:

! is bang (for brevity – cf “exclamation mark”), or can be read as “NOT” when used in Boolean expressions. Context counts.
? query
* star (although aterisk is used just as often by techies, probably more than the general population if anything)
# hash (sometimes pound, but that’s losing ground outside the US)
^ hat (as above)

| pipe or OR (not a normal language mark, I know, just for reference)
` backquote (rather than left quote)
’ single quote – implies that it has no lean to left or right, whereas apostrophe looks like a raised comma. Although these are the same mark, the context of a quote is to enclose something, so they always go in pairs. The second one might be implied or read as end-quote (never unquote). On the other hand apostrophes (like geeks) remain single.
& may be ampersand or “and” (with the strict meaning of AND or bitwise-AND in Boolean terms, depending on programming language)
+ is always plus, never “and” (to avoid confusion with &) – is minus for math, dash otherwise. Non-native speakers seem to always use “minus”
. similarly point for math (2.3), dot otherwise (.com). Version numbers of software may be 2point3 or 2dot3, the latter is more common when there are subversions eg 2.3.1 which make it a non-number in the normal sense. (cf lawyers’ use of paragraph numbers where 2point3point1 seems to be the convention for reading aloud)

Never confuse a slash/ backslash\ and dash- (minus).
Implied marks will usually be omitted – eg http is always followed by :// in a web URL, so they would be unspoken (as indeed the http part may be).

Last edited by AdamVero (2007-09-04 09:37:01)