Eggcorn Forum

She’s thirteen, which is a might old for a best friend.

giving up those points to Steve Spurrier’s Gators or Florida State is a might different than Indiana and Clemson

This trip I was trying to come up with something a might different, when low and behold! They now have a section called “weight management”

It seems a might difficult to find tires for a motorcycle.

Sorry I was a might long winded

(Actually, it’s more like I’m about to be:)

The noun “mite” in this kind of context, like its synonyms “tad” and “(little) bit”, means that the adjectival quality is present in a noticeable but not necessarily disqualifyingly large degree. I.e. the subject is quite a bit Adjective but not necessarily a whole lot.

There is a colloquial usage of “mighty”, perhaps for us pedants a shortened form of “mightily” (or even a mildly sacrilegious “Almight(il)y”), as an intensifier more or less equivalent to `very’. This, not so rarely, no doubt often by typo but possibly as a kind of eggcornish malaprop, gets shortened to “might”. E.g.

i must say it looks might good

(245 ghits on “looks might good”, and of course there are many more similar structures.)

Sometimes then this “might” << “mighty” shows up in the context “a might Adj N”:

I noticed that it took a might long time to load my SCSI drivers

The same structure without the noun will be homophonous with “a mite Adj”, and can help give rise to the eggcorn.

The following case is interesting:

love the mandolin at the start..and the fiddle..its pretty but a might long intro though..pretty harmonies..love the melody..the lyrics are very meaningful

This you can parse as “it’s pretty but has a mighty long intro” or “it’s pretty but has an intro that’s a mite/might long”, i.e. “a mite-long intro”.

In any case, “a mite Adj” ought to mean a kind of opposite to “a might(y lot) Adj”; the first minimizes while the other exaggerates the quality of the Adj. Yet the eggcorn works for me, because “a mite/tad/bit Adj” is so often used litotically, pretending to say something is “just a bit” Adj when in fact you would maintain that it is “quite a bit” Adj. Coming from the other direction, “mighty” is very often used in overt and conscious, mildly humorous exaggeration—it is not as strong an intensifier as, say, “terribly” or “aw(e)fully”, and even they are awfully likely to be used when the quality isn’t terribly strong. Thus both “mite” and “might(y)” wind up being used as vaguely colorful adverbial expressions denoting a notable degree of the quality denoted by the adjective. They both fit a very large number of the same cases.

p.s. Is “low and behold” an eggcorn? It is standard for some, but I don’t get the reasonable imagery for it.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-11-24 12:37:03)