Eggcorn Forum

Uh-oh, that would be my fault.

I don’t particularly enjoy being seen as a nasty and haughty gatekeeper, but I do see how it would appear like that. The thing is, while there are three main posters with full access to the main database (Arnold Zwicky and Ben Zimmer in addition to myself), this site and this forum were 100% created and put up by me alone. I derive no income for it and pay for the hosting. And I’ve been chronically overworked in my day job for a while now. Arnold and Ben are not any less busy than myself, and handle submissions from many other sources—correspondence via email, including from journalists, learned societies (ADS-L), Language Log etc etc.

So instead of standing at the gate turning my nose up at each new contribution, I am struggling to keep up with all the eggcorn-related projects. There is a fair bit to do on the backend, still. We still have no comments on the main articles back, and that’s a shame, and I am currently studying moving to a totally different platform/framework. Moreover, we have between us literally hundreds of “enterable” eggcorns, and an editing job on the existing entries.

But yes, I do read the forums. And I am in admiration what a great job you have done, and I’m thinking of jorkel, Pat, yourself, Ken, and quite a few others, to make this a place of debate and exchange.

As a matter of fact, I have started entering forum contribution guided mostly by which forum posts receive a lot of search engine hits. There happened to be a bunch from Ken Lakritz. On my list are also a number from Joe, to wit: “not one wit”, “kit gloves” [which has been proposed several times], “edgeways”, and “starve off”, provided, the research on them goes right (sometimes things get muddier when you research more).

Peter Forster wrote:

To be more positive, the near-eggcorns and other linguistic quirks which frequently appear in the forum are every bit as interesting as a classical eggcorn – eggcornicity isn’t everything

Yes, and that’s another point: The entire eggcorns classification system is very young and in flux. Where do eggcorns fit into the larger scheme? What are those near-eggcorns? There’s a lot going in eggcorn land, and you all are a part of it. I just hope I’m not straining your patience too much, but I’m doing what I can. Really.

Now I feel like a frock-coated character in a silent two-reeler churlishly twirling my waxed moustaches while a hooting trainful of woes threatens to separate our Chris from her head and feet. I’m sorry. But it is rather frustrating that there seems to be nothing we can do to help – is it essential that gatekeepers have to be qualified in linguistics? It may be that among the ranks of forum contributors there are some with the time as well as the expertise to help with the backlog; I reluctantly exclude myself on the grounds of attention deficit and notoriously poor powers of analysis. Could there be some way we could slip small financial contributions towards the support of the site?

Pat, I’m a bit more in Peter’s camp… attention deficit …er, but not mustachioed. As you can probably tell by my posts, I try to provide everything that’s needed up front: Google hits, dictionary definitions, and applicable examples. Then I move on. It does sap my energy a bit to revisit old material since I’ve usually already said everything that I wanted to say. Besides, I think that the finally arbiters really need to be persons with strong academic skills like yourself and the linguists. It helps to validate the eggcorns if the subtleties are definitively judged by those most knowledgable with the language. Also, like Peter, I’d be willing to provide a small financial contribution via a Paypal arrangement or something. This has really been a terrific forum. It basically allows us to take half-baked ideas and make them ..er.. full-baked.

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