Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I ran across this as a caption “Pure Bread American” on a photo of a patriotic tattoo. In context it struck me as an eggcorn, so I decided to do some research.
Google yielded 33K hits on “pure bread”. (I was surprised, as I don’t remember ever encountering this before.) Scanning the first few pages, almost all seemed to be about dogs, cats, and a scattering of other animals.
As I got deeper in the Google results, I started finding references to “pure bread” where the intended meaning was the literal one. One was a quote from the Epistle of Saint Ignatius of Antioch to the Romans: “I am God’s grain, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts, that I may be found pure bread” (with additional variants of that). Others were mentions of pure versus adulterated bread. There were also some references to “Pure Bread” with the capitalization just like that, a clever brand name for baked goods.
Since the overwhelming majority of non-literal references are about animal pedigrees, and “pure bread” doesn’t seem to have any clever or insightful connection to these, I conclude that this is just a misspelling, not an eggcorn. But I decided to post my research here, to perhaps save somebody else from bothering with the research.
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Eggstatic wrote:
Since the overwhelming majority of non-literal references are about animal pedigrees, and “pure bread” doesn’t seem to have any clever or insightful connection to these, I conclude that this is just a misspelling, not an eggcorn.
That would be my take on it, too, apart from a few grain-related puns: The verb is breed, and you know that the past participle is pronounced [brÉ›d]—now how do you spell it? It might be bred or bread ... you can easily pull out the wrong one.
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In reference to Eggstatic’s google hit numbers, I got something similar when I tried “pure bread”—36k. But I’ve been noticing recently that there have been some pretty amazing disparities between “raw google hits” (in which the duplicates haven’t been removed) and “unique hits” (in which every unique citation is counted only once).
When I went looking for unique hits for this, I found only 802 citations. Maybe dog-breeders just link to each others’ posts an awful lot, but this kind of huge disparity is becoming really common. The pattern casts a shadow over our tendency here on the forum to use raw hit numbers.
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Good point about unique hits, Pat. I wasn’t aware of the distinction.
Apropos of Egstatic’s “Pure Bread”, there was an old contest to name products and companies using familiar quotations as slogans, as in “The Fancy Bread Company”-slogan: “Tell me, where is Fancy Bread?” And the “Thankless Child Knife Company”-slogan: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a Thankless Child.” Anyone care to join in?
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