Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
The Eggcorn Forum and the Eggcorn Database are currently in the process of being converted into static sites.
Once the conversion is complete, all existing posts are expected to still be accessible at their original URLs. However, no new posts will be possible.
Feel free to comment on the relevant forum threads.
Chris -- 2025-05-10
For a long time, I thought this kind of flying machine was a hand-glider, i.e. controlled with one’s hands. In conversation yesterday, it turned out that more than one of the group I was in still thought that, having never seen it written.
Strangely enough, when I search for “hand-glider”, it turns out that it is a legitimate term for a variation of hang-glider (with a hand-shaped wing, I think). How confusing is that? A good number of the results to appear to mean hang-glider, though.
Offline
This reminded me of Ken Lakritz’s find of “right wind” for “right-wing,” “left wind” for “left-wing” and “wind nut” for “wing-nut.” I wouldn’t have guessed that /nd/ and /ng/ occur often in variation for each other, but there it is. After seeing this post, I went looking for “hand dog look” for “hang dog look” and “wing chill factor” for “wind chill factor”—and I got about a half dozen hits for each of them. I’ll bet there are many more examples of nd/ng substitution out there just waiting to be documented.
Offline
This seems to happen when the ”-nd” or ”-ng” is followed by a consonant, and the the two blur together; where I live, “sandwich” is often heard as “samwich”, for example. For “hang-glider”, it seems to be pronounced “han’glider”, with no information present for the blurred-out consonant (already a little blurred on its left!).
There’s probably a “rich vane to be mind” for the -nd to -m confusion, as witnessed by “sandwich” above; I ought not to waste my time looking for “hand burger”, “Sam castle”, “wing cheater”, etc….
Offline
Over 600 hits for “handburger.” Most of them are Jeffrey Dahmer jokes, etc., but a fair number appear to be the real deal. Simply a dialectal variant, or does the usual way of eating them play a role?
Offline