Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
This is quite common. 19,600 google hits for death knoll versus 1,380,000 for death knell. Perhaps the JFK influence.
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If I said ‘grassy’ and demanded an immediate association, ‘knoll’ would issue from most lips, whether they had any idea of what a knoll was or not. I know the word ‘knoll’ only because of JFK, and for many folk the word ‘knell’ is equally obscure. Curiously, there happens to be 29 ghits for ‘grassy knell’ which, apart from a stray vowel, keeps us firmly in Dallas and trapped in one of the 60s. Its eggcornicity is relatively unimportant – that certain words are somehow nailed to one event seems to me to be far more interesting.
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I wonder if there is a subconscious tendency to rhyme it with “death toll.”
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Welcome, Carlos. And welcome back Peter—“grassy knell” is alarmingly apt.
Carlos’s find reminds me of one of my favorite non-Databased eggcorns: “death nail” for “death knell.” It’s been suggested three times by klakritz and others.
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