The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

With the borrowing of words and phrases from other languages, English speakers have developed intuitions about the meaning of foreign roots. “Alternative”, “alter ego” etc. are sufficiently frequent to link alter- to the sense “other”, and make alter- more transparent than ulter-/ultra. (Note that the original sense “the other of two” has been largely obscured: the use of alternative is a common entry in usage advice guides not only in English, but also in French and German, and probably in other languages.)

In the forum thread, poster booboo also noted a further development to alternative motive.

From Freeman’s Brainiac column of 15 August 2007, about the “Mr. Boffo” strip (which can also be viewed in Mark Liberman’s Language Log posting of 23 August 2007):

I had never seen bi-product for byproduct, but it’s a logical enough mistake: Here, Mr. B (as corporate executive) is interpreting by-product — an incidental outcome of a process — as bi-product, one of two simultaneous results. (But what is the second product he refers to — simply sadistic pleasure?)

This by- prefix, meaning “aside, apart from the main issue,” is fairly uncommon now; an illegitimate child, for instance, is no longer called a by-blow, as Fielding’s Tom Jones was. But we still have byplay and bypass to remind us of why it’s byproduct.

Biproduct is also a real term, says Wikipedia, but it’s not exactly a household word: “In category theory and its applications to mathematics, a biproduct is a generalisation of the notion of direct sum that makes sense in any preadditive category.”

All right, then. But I suspect the mathematical biproduct is too arcane to be tempting writers into careless misspellings. In Mister Boffo’s use, at least, biproduct has all the marks of a genuine eggcorn.

[Plenty of occurrences to be found on the web; two examples are above.]

On 2005/02/16 , Scriven reported “2,150 Google hits, most of which appear to use it as a pun.” (There are now about five times that number.) But there are some that seem to be serious.

In my Language Log piece I maintain that this error is the result of treating “beyond the [pel]” as an unanalyzable idiom and using a familiar spelling (”pail”) for the baffling part [pel] (representing a now-obsolete noun “pale”). So, not an eggcorn, but a related type of error (which I decided to call “pails”, from this very case). There might, of course, be a few people out there who have managed to see pails in the idiom.

The AAA Tour Book quote was from Cleary.

Ruckuses are raucous, so the replacement makes some sense.

The title of Mark Liberman’s 2004 Language Log piece gives a whole pile of variants: “Chock, choke, chuck, check, chalk, jock, shock, chog: An ancient plantation of ache-corns”. “Choke-full” is the original (with “chuck-full” and “chock-full” as early variants); “chock-full” is now the dominant variant. “Chock” doesn’t make much sense, so it’s no surprise that people have attempted to re-shape it. The connection to chalk is obscure (Brians: “Chalk has nothing to do with it”), but at least “chalk” is a reasonably common actual word (and homophonous with “chock” for some speakers).

“Chalk full” has been reported at least five times in the ecdb comments pages.