Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to
The forum administrator reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.
Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I noticed someone around here say “I hear spoken by people who are intelligent but who clearly do not read” and thought of a friend who wrote manusha for minutia. It took me a while to figure it out. I also went off on this mental tangent:
The name Marcia became Marsha before I was born, so I always accepted it.
Ditto for marshall, which was clearly martial, so I never freaked out about that either.
Why get all up in a lather (uh-oh) about Shawn (American? Ghetto?) , when Sean (Irish) is just as strange as Jean (French), which circulates as Ian, Hans, Juan, Joao, Giovanni, Ivan, Johann and, of course, our own beloved John? Isn’t Siobhan a woman’s name? I knew a gal named Shayvawn. She was definitely ghetto, but I suppose all the above have been at some time or other.
It also made me think of Chopin’s Minute Waltz, which we always pronounce as the division of time. I suspect it was originally dubbed the My-Newt Waltz, since it’s rather short. Of course, the 60-second slice of time is pretty tiny as timespans go, so I guess those words are the same.
So I’ll get off my high-horse (am I exposed with that one?) and swallow manusha. As my intelligent but semi-literate son likes to point out, “ya got it, didn’t ya?”. (GRRRRRR)
Offline