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Chris -- 2018-04-11
As I was wandering out to the bus stop to catch a ride to school this morning, it struck me: I wasn’t immediately sure whether the proper spelling of the idiom was “pore one’s heart out” or “pour one’s heart out”. Of course, “pour one’s heart out” is correct, as a check with my trusty dictionary of idioms told me.
But both make some amount of sense. To pour one’s heart out is to spill out all of the feelings that you’ve had bottled up. Presumably one could verb pore as “to put a pore in”, yielding something like “to put a pore in one’s heart”, and a pore is a hole through which feelings could leak out in a similar manner.
A Google search turns up about 23 hits for “pore * heart out”, and a combined total of about 50 for “pore my/your/his/her heart out”, most on blogs:
“I was deeply shocked last night at the elimination of Melinda Doolittle. Week after week I wait to listen to her pore her heart out in whatever song she sings.”—Comment by A.J. Williams, http://www.realitytvmagazine.com/blog/2 … erica.html
”... [S]ince I am currently feeling stupidly alone and lamenting my continuing dearth of any noticable romantic junctures, I am likely to pore my heart out to myself one way or another, and it may as well be through the magic of prose …”—Post at http://zinar7.livejournal.com/
”’Dear Suzanne, once again I did not win the cookies. I enter every time and I pore my heart out to no avail. What is it going to take? Just wondering. Anyway, I still love you and your Dear Reader Column.’”—Quoted in http://dearreader.typepad.com/dear/2006 … col_2.html
It’s obviously not very mainstream (the original turns up 880,000 or so results) but it looks eggcorny enough. Any thoughts?
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Your logic seems pretty sound to me. Though I must admit I’m not familiar with the “pore” idiom.
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This is if “pore” can be used as a verb, meaning “to put a pore in.” And despite the fact that “pore” is already used as a verb with a different meaning, “to pore over” something. It seems a little bit too much of a stretch.
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And here’s a variation I stumbled upon yesterday. “Pour” for “pore” is already in the Eggcorn Database but doesn’t seem to have been mentioned in the Forum yet:
This series covers the taboo subjects which have had light shed on them by pouring over the materials in this repository
description of TV show
This looks like one of those instances where someone replaces an unfamiliar term with a more familiar one.
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As I often do, I say this is just bad spelling.
“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” – Lily Tomlin
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yanogator wrote:
As I often do, I say this is just bad spelling.
I would agree that this is likely, though not certain.
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