Eggcorn Forum

As rogerthat notes (here http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=2785) abject lesson has been suggested more than once, but has not been discussed in the forum.

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=2242
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=2441

It is also discussed on Language Log, where Mark Liberman calls it an “incorrection” but not an eggcorn.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 04917.html

This does not, in my opinion, qualify as an eggcorn, for two reasons.

First, I doubt that most people who use the phrase abject lesson see the word abject as adding any meaning to the phrase. The verb, which the Oxford English Dictionary calls obsolete, meant (means?) “to cast off or throw away”. The related adjective describes things that have been cast off, things of low quality, or persons held in low esteem.

The Davies/BYU corpus contains 438 instances of the word. I surveyed 100 of these instances, and all but one were the adjective usage. (The lone outlier appears to be a proper noun: “It was as good as Aschenbach, who in The Abject had come out against the abyss and gloomy introspection, was going to get.”) Of these 438 instances, 92 occur before the word poverty, 47 before failure(s), 20 terror, and 18 fear. This suggests to me that the word is productive – it is not confined to a handful of set phrases – and its current meaning is something like “low, base” for most users.

I don’t see any trace of that “low, base” meaning in the phrase object lesson (nor abject lesson).

Second, the Language Log post linked above suggests that “several readers” use abject lesson, but it does not suggest that any of them justified the usage as sensible. Mark quotes Emily Lilly, who thinks she may have picked it up from “a TV or comics-section character [who] used it during my childhood.”

Similarly, usingenglish.com (via JonW719 in Forum post 2441, above) says,

(India) An abject lesson serves as a warning to others. (In some varieties of English ‘object lesson’ is used.)

Both Emily Lilly and usingenglish.com seem to suggest that this is a spelling or pronunciation variation, not a semantic reshaping. If the meaning of abject in abject lesson is not transparent to its users, it does not fit my definition of an eggcorn.