Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
I’m new at this game, but wonder if the following item (from a computer system administrator) is of interest:
You could have saved me alot of time researching this last night if you had put that in your email. You need to make sure that you tell us all the details so we don’t spend our wheels.Offline
Welcome to the forum, russinoff.
You have found an eggcorn, in my opinion, and one that no one else seems to have noticed before. You can find about four or five other examples of this substitution by doing the Google searches http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22spend+our+wheels%22 and http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22spendi … wheels%22.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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The idea being that you would wear the wheels out, or burn the rubber off them, by spinning them? Makes good enough sense to me. I’d like to be surer that it was really standard for anybody. Though it is not a likely typo, it could be a typed malaprop (I do that sort of thing), or a one-off blend with something like “spend all day/your time (uselessly)â€, or something else not fully eggcornish.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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