Eggcorn Forum

Welcome to the Eggcorn website, Alicevee.

That’s a very intriguing reshaping. I wonder if you might try to elaborate a bit on the imagery that you would associate with it.

I also wonder if there are any comparable examples on the internet. This could very well turn out to be a single-instance eggcorn. Nevertheless, it seems like it might have an amusing interpretation.

A Google search for “hell bent for” returns about 278,000 raw hits. I used a random number generator to select twenty of the first one hundred pages, and checked what word comes next. Of those twenty pages analyzed, we have “hell bent for:”

leather – 15
heaven – 2
election – 1
letters – 1
naugahyde – 1

I would suggest that “hell bent for letters” and “hell bent for naugahyde” are both jokes based on “hell bent for leather.” “Hell bent for heaven” is, in both cases, the name of a play by Hatcher Hughes; it may be an allusion to either the “leather” or “election” version (on which, see below) – or to neither.

I should point out that most of the “leather” pages refer to “Hell Bent for Leather,” a song by Judas Priest. Seven of the 15 refer specifically to that band; another three refer to heavy metal (the style of music). In addition, two of the pages refer to another musician, Frankie Lane, who had an album of that same name a generation earlier.

In order to weed out some of these titles, I repeated the search in Google News. There were 12 hits for “hell bent for”. The next word or phrase was:

leather – 7
election – 2
their own reasons – 1
a legacy – 1
the basket – 1

It seems as though “hell bent for leather” is more common that “hell bent for election,” but both are out there.

On the other hand, I think that this is not an eggcorn, but two similar sounding (idiomatic?) phrases. If Alicevee’s mother-in-law has a specific image in mind, though, it might be eggcornish, at least in her case.

By the way, the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest listing for “hell-bent” is from 1835.

Many of the OED citations refer to either political songs/speeches, or cowboy novels. The former, which occur slightly earlier, might be likely to co-occur with “election.” The latter, which are slightly more frequent, might be likely to co-occur with “leather.”

1835 Knickerbocker VI. 12 A large encampment of savages,..‘hell-bent on carnage’. 1840 Pol. Song (Cent. Dict.), Maine went Hell-bent For Governor Kent. 1904 Boston Herald 2 Aug. 6 The Populist Democrats are going ‘hell-bent’, as the old song says, for Roosevelt. 1910 W. M. RAINE B. O’Connor ii. 21, I know your kind—hell-bent to spend what you cash in. 1910 C. E. MULFORD Hopalong Cassidy xxviii. 184 As soon as we lick this aggregation of trouble-hunters, what’s left will ride hell~bent for that valley. 1912 L. J. VANCE Destroying Angel ix, Unless you’re hell-bent upon sticking around here. 1918 C. E. MULFORD Man fr. Bar-20 xv. 152, I was hell~bent to get down here,..an’ now I’m hell-bent to get back again. 1926 B. CRONIN Red Dawson vi, Shaw sending the coach hell-bent round the curve of Jumping Lead. 1935 A. SQUIRE Sing Sing Doctor iii. 32 We’ll always have people hell bent on doing what they want to. 1957 Times 27 Dec. 6/1 Sir Edmund Hillary’s message..went on to say: ‘We are heading hellbent for the Pole, God willing and crevasses permitting.’ 1967 Spectator 24 Nov. 633/1 This report has been widely used to sustain the charge that the French government was hell-bent on feeding speculation against the pound.