Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2011-03-08
My wife made this mistake yesterday. We were talking about what kind of yard we want, and she was clearly saying “zeroscaping.” I informed her that it was in fact spellec X-E-R-I and she goes “oh like ‘dry’!” She is a medical professional and knows about stuff like xeroderma, but she didn’t make the connection. She explained to me that she had thought it referred to the use of “zero water.” A Google search finds nearly six thousand examples of the eggcorn, compared with well over two hundred thousand of the proper spelling.
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OK, I just found through my Google search that some people actually use the term “zeroscaping” as something related to but distinct from xeriscaping. No way to tell what percentage of the results are of this nature. But my wife made the mistake in earnest, so it must be out there. There also seems to be a little bit of punning.
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Welcome to the forum, Kenny Van Eimeren. I think this is a good eggcorn—I think some landscape professionals might have started distinguishing between the two terms, but I too have talked to people who thought that “xeriscaping” had to do with “zero water.” This was first posted on the forum a couple of years ago: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1265
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