Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
In a sports forum I encountered “lesserlikes” in a sense of less prominent or less able players. The clear intent was “lesser lights”. Google gave only 7 hits (but good ones) on the single word “lesserlike”; the singular “lesser like” produced a large number of hits but almost all irrelevant. But the 619 for “lesser likes” were pay dirt, a quick scan suggesting that nearly all are in the “lesser light” sense. The majority were sport-related. Some examples:
And now to top it all off they’ve scrapped an whole weekend of national league fixtures, so the fans of the lesser likes can get themselves down to Cardiff …
www.rugbyleague.org/index.php?showtopic … etlastpost
Endless conspiracies about secret governments and a bunch of lesser likes going into bat to try and create the resistance. Some of these people genuinely …
forums.randi.org/archive/index.php/t-71747.html
As for the midfield, you can get away with playing Gerrard on the right against the lesser likes, but not the Chelseas and the Utds. ...
www.ohracing.net/forum/uk-football/1443 … ootie.html
This one appears to fulfil the classic eggcorn requirements. It exhibits a plausible but false construction (lesser likes = ones who are liked less).
There’s an interesting subtype. Examples:
... of no less a lineup than Verlaine, Melville, and Rilke (and more recently, the lesser likes of filmmaker Werner Herzog and songwriter Suzanne Vega). ...
weeklywire.com/ww/08-18-97/memphis_book.html
Pressure and expectation will be on Vaughan, Flintoff , Petersen and the lesser likes of Bell and Collingwood to come up with some improved performances …
www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread. … 457&page=2
Here, “lesser likes” forms a kind of portmanteau phrase together with the common-enough “the likes of” to form “the lesser likes of”.
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Welcome to the forum, Otis46—nice find! I esp. like the portmanteau.
At least two of your three egs. of the first type seem to be British—does this seem to be more prevalent in British sources to you?
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Certainly US sources seem to be proportionately under-represented, and Australian (where I, and the forum where I discovered this one, come from) over-represented.
The first 25 sources that I could immediately place break up thus: Australia 8, UK 7, US 7, Canada 3, Ireland 1. The most obvious explanation might have been that the phrase “lesser lights” is similarly distributed, but Google does not seem to support that.
I have a theory (which I expect does not originate with me) that eggcorn distribution can occur in disproportionate clusters like this because of a Web-based copycat effect. Someone uses it online, it’s seen by thousands of people who read a blog or forum, and a small number of those people repeat the solecism in that or similar forums, more than likely in the same country. So if even one UK or Australian user used “lesser like” in, say, a cricket forum, it could result in small outbreaks in those countries. The cricket (or football, or whatever) example is actually supported by the Google-inspection observation that a large proportion – more than half – of the instances of “lesser like” are in sport-related contexts, compared to a much smaller proportion of “lesser light” occurrences.
I can support that “local infection” theory with a personal anecdote, again relating to sports writing (do you see a pattern here?!) It’s not an eggcorn, but it’s related. A while ago I read in a newspaper column that a certain personality should have “stuck fat with” something or other. That personality being on the portly side, I took it as a funny typo for “stuck fast” and posted it to a forum for people’s amusement. I got a couple of replies saying “no, that’s a proper saying”. I’d never heard it, so I did some Google-based exploration.
The earliest occurrence I could find of “stick/stuck fat with” was in an important and widely-reported set-piece speech at an Australian football club in late 2006. There are now a dozen or so distinct instances of variations on these words to be seen via Google. Every one of them is Australian, and most are in a football context. I’ve also heard the phrase used once or twice times since on television.
I am absolutely convinced that the original instance was uttered because of either a typo, or a misreading by the speaker, of “stick fast” in that speech. Some who heard or read it then used it themselves, and it has thence spread into this very specific locale.
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