Eggcorn Forum

The world is full of jokes about putting a noose on your neck or a ball and chain on your leg when you get “shackled”: getting “bridled” seems to me to have a lot of eggcorn potential. (Not to mention the more explicitly sexual associations of horse riding.)

I wonder if there’s a spelling, and spell-checking, effect in some cases. That is, people who write bridle shower may be thinking bridal but be unsure of its spelling. A likely guess might be bridel, but some spell-checkers (such as the one in MS Word 2003) would correct that to “bridle”.

On the other hand, there is the “ball and chain” image. It may be impossible to tell which of these are eggcornistic and which are Cupertinologic.

DavidTuggy wrote:

Cupertinologic? I don’t get the allusion.

Sorry, too inside.

Benjamin Zimmer, at Language Log, reports that The Cupertino Effect is the name given to spell-checker induced errors by writers and translators for the European Union. The name derives from the fact that a version of Microsoft spell checker routinely corrected misspellings of cooperation as Cupertino (the name of a city in California).
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 02911.html

I wonder if the pun (as I take it to be) “bridal path” might be contributing to the confusion. “Bridle paths” were originally trails that weren’t wide and level enough for wagons. Today “bridle path” can designate any passage that is designated as a horse trail. “Bridal path” gets,surprisingly, 20% as many ghits (50K) as “bridle path” (250K). Most of the “bridal paths” are street names, shop names, movies, chapels, etc. The phrase “bridal path” is so common that I suspect many have lost the punning reference, leading them to confuse the words “bridle” and “bridal.”