Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
A google search for “in the linelight” yields 12 hits of which only 2 were possibly intentional malapropisms. Is this to be considered mere slippage? One hit from a spelling checker-less journalist:
”...If college athletes want to be in the linelight when they do well, they have to accept the critism that comes when they don’t do well.”
However, a google search for the single word “linelight” generates 5,320 hits, of which many seem to involve trademarked commercial nomenclature that makes sense; e.g.: “LineLight maximizes the illumination potential…” Note that “limelight” and “in the limelight” generate 582,000 and 1,030,000 hits respectively. Not being a formal linguist, I don’t know whether a trademark automatically disqualifies potential candidate phrases from eggcornhood or not.
I recall that the same thing happened when “boulder dash” (from balderdash) became a trademark.
BTW, I’m new here (hence my misguided topic entry in the Contribute! meeting) and hope I’m not simply adding to the eggcorn fusion. Many thanks to Chris, Ben, Arnold and the eggcornistas for their time and expertise. Blindly stumbling upon Eggcorn Forum really made my day.
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