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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Five years ago Mark Liberman noted in one of his Language Log posts an eggcorn that has not been reviewed in this forum (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 01088.html). He pointed out then that “crated equal†occurs with ten times the frequency of “creted equal,†suggesting that the word “crate†has some role in the misspelling of “created equal.†In other words, “crated equally†was probably an eggcorn.
A lot has changed in the last five years. Now, instead of 50 sites with “crated equal,†we have more than 150 unique sites. So is the error becoming more common? Not at all. In fact, there is probably a decrease in the frequency of the error. Between the date that Liberman did his research and today Google has increased the number of web pages it indexes by a hundred-fold. There should be 5000 sites with this error if the same ratio applies. Even assuming that Liberman was citing non-unique hits, the growth in this eggcorn is still only ten-fold, an order of magnitude too low (Google currently reports about 423 non-unique hits for “crated equally,†and since this is under 1000, the number is an actual count, not an estimate). I have no explanation for this change.
But that’s not the oddest difference between the situation in 2004 and now. Google now reports that the number of unique hits for “creted equal†is comparable to “crated equal!†This implies that “crate†is not influencing the misspelling.
I’m suddenly having a bad feeling about our dependence on Google data.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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