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Chris -- 2018-04-11
In this post I found:
“You lucky lot, I would give my high teeth to visit the plex.” Clearly, “eye teeth” was meant.
(The use of “you lot” suggests a non-North American.)
A search for “give * high teeth” OR “gave * high teeth” OR “giving * high teeth” turns up 27 hits in Google and a few more in Google Groups.
Last edited by GrantBarrett (2008-05-24 15:03:08)
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I think this is one of the best finds of 2008, and it gives me hope that some other truly excellent eggcorns are still out there waiting to be discovered.
My own eye-teeth are fairly prominent and vampirical—truly a bit higher than most of the teeth around them, so this makes a lot of sense to me. I also get far higher Google hit readings: over 600 raw hits for “give * high teeth” alone. This seems to be relatively widespread.
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Vintage 2006 I’m afraid. It doesn’t show up on Google for some reason, but 2006-11-07 I posted this:
Googling for ‘high teeth’ gives too many tools and sawing hits. There is an idiom “I’d give my eye teeth for…†so:If I were a pollster , particularly given the record of the polls in the last 15 years , I ’ d give my high teeth for it . ’ ’ ...
www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=1000010 … 0&refer=uk – 58k –
I ’ d give my high teeth to be able to go somewhere to wear something like that . . . it’s beautiful Sadley I think our local supermarket may call the …
forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=45706 – 82k –
It can take a long time to learn when there’s no one there to tell you and I for one would have given my high teeth for a lecture like this when I was …
www.prescottandmackay.co.uk/courses/foo … eminar.php – 11k –
It’s not that I have never wanted one, in fact on many occasions I would have given my high teeth, or Sheila’s right arm, for one especially when there has …
www.soon.org.uk/stories/the_wheelbarrow.htm -
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Oops, sorry, Peter. I searched for it, but didn’t get anything on the homepage search button. Should have used Jorkel’s favorite approach, which does indeed bring it up.
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A frequent substitution for “eye teeth†is “I-teeth.†Perhaps hundreds of sites. This also has eggcorn potential: Pat’s canines presumably look like two capital I s in a row of boxy text. (I s without the serif bars, I hope).
Examples:
Question on a mothering site: “My 2 year old has all her teeth except her top I-teeth. Is this normal? â€
Tooth care sales site: “I just noticed that Corben has some molars coming in! But he doesn’t have his I teeth yet, so is it normal for the molars to come down before the I teeth ? â€
Health Q&A site: “I have braces and an extender in my mouth and my two I teeth are loose.â€
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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This also has eggcorn potential: Pat’s canines presumably look like two capital I s in a row of boxy text. (I s without the serif bars, I hope).
My own I-teeth are definitely sans seraph. They stand out against the much blockier upper incisors, but they’re pretty Dracula-like, coming to a neat point. (Sorry, I don’t own a digital camera….) They don’t look like I’s to me, but I don’t know how typical I am.
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Sans seraph. Ooooh.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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