Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
“More often than not” is a sort of “elliptical” phrase, leaving out some details that the reader must add back in to understand it (“This happens more often than it doesn’t happen”).
“More often than naught” (3,870 ghits) is much clearer, at least for those who have “naught” in their ordinary vocabulary.
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Welcome to the Eggcorn website, Ntsimp. The nought/not eggcorn is documented in database here:
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It’s impossible to comment there.
But that’s “naught » not”, which is exactly the opposite.
In this one, people replace an ordinary word with a less common one.
There has to be some sort of motivation for that, no?
I think it comes from the weird syntax of “more often than not”.
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You could be right… I think I might have glossed over what you were suggesting… Looks like this may merit a closer look. As far as I can tell, the other two entries in the forum were also going the opposite direction to yours.
Last edited by jorkel (2007-11-27 17:27:26)
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