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waist » waste

Chiefly in:   pantywaste , wasteband

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • I find it a little disturbing that someone who wears a crucifix around their neck, also carries a gun in their wasteband. (link)
  • He was also wearing a pair of her work out pants. The blue sweats had been the only ones with a drawstring and thus small enough for her to tie tightly around his small waste. (link)
  • A thin diaphanous gown clung to the gentle curves of her body, fastened at her slim waste with a silver belt that bore the image of a face, it’s cheeks puffed out, and blowing. (link)
  • Materials Required: Old blue jean pockets (back and wasteband attached); colored felt; slick paint; glue; Easter grass (link)
  • So you have two choices about this situation. You can either continue to bellyache and complain like a whiny pantywaste, blaming Mark Messier for everything from Pavel Bure’s gimpy knee to the tragic offseason death of Roman Lyashenko to the breakup of Ben Affleck and J. Lo (which is actually the one thing that I wish I could blame on him). (Hockeybird.com, September 15, 2003)

Analyzed or reported by:

Wasting away, in one’s stomach region, has become the epitome of physical beauty.

Update, 2006/03/12: On 2006/03/11, Wilson Gray reported _pantie waste_ to the American Dialect Society mailing list:

> A while ago, a friend of mine spoke somewhat as follows:
>
> “I don’t what made that jerk think that I would possibly want to sleep with him. That would have been a total [pAntiweist]!”
>
> I asked her how that last word was spelled. She replied:
>
> “P-A-N-T-I-E W-A-S-T-E.”
>
> I asked her what that meant. She replied that it meant that said jerk wasn’t worth the effort involved in taking off one’s undies.
>
> After a bit more conversation, it became clear that what she had in mind was “pantywaist,” misconstrued and respelled to fit that misconstruction.
>
> For those too young to have worn a pantywaist, it was clothing for (male) toddlers. It consisted of a pair of short pants - the panties - worn over one’s diaper and buttoned along its top edge to the bottom edge of a Peter Pan-collared shirt - the waist - that itself buttoned up the front.
>
>From its use as clothing for babies comes its former(?) pejorative use as
an insult for an adult male.

This eggcorn is found in the spellings _pantywaste_, _panty waste_, _pantiewaste_ or _pantie waste_, with the first appearing to be the most common. Others, too, have opted for the altered spelling on similar grounds:

* You deserve some kind of formal recognition for using the word “pantywaist” in your blog. I have always wondered about the etymology of that word - and I actually thought that it was spelled “pantyWASTE”, so it took on kind of a mysterious and SIMULTANEOULY (haha) disgusting image in my mind…. (link)
* you mean pantywaste? is it supposed to be pantywaist?
i always thought it was like you’re a waste and also i called you women’s underwear (link)

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/15 |

let alone » little lone

Variant(s):  little own

Classification: English – resyllabification

Spotted in the wild:

  • nobody knows how a race is going to come out until the race happens, i don’t have a grudge with ben or you. i guess we will have to see this season, i wouldn’t be so cocky, you don’t even know me, little lone what i’m doing to my car. (link)
  • I think that if I hadn’t had her support I would never had plucked up the courage to buy a corset little own wear one. (link)
  • Some of the biggest complainers (like Tiribulus for example) have never even installed it little lone used it and have no Idea what they are talking about. But pretend to some how magically know it all…. (link)
  • I won’t argue with you as I can’t even use dreamweaver properly, little own master html or other codes or do any programming, but what do I call myself? (link)
  • I haven’t seen anyone make an argument against him that I find is more convincing. Simply put there are no contemporary writings so until there are some found then I wouldn’t be convinced Jesus even existed (little own a God). (link)
  • Claire ground her teeth, part of her wanted to charge into that school and teer that guys head off for even hasseling her daughter little own the implied mutant comment. (link)
  • Please be kind, remember this all took place before resources like this reflector were available, and u were lucky if one other guy in the area radio society even listened to 160, little lone trying to transmit. (link)
  • Granted if I used Channel Master’s equipment I’m looking at approx $300 for the parts but $400 for the install is insane! I would install it myself by my house is three stories high and I don’t have a ladder that even comes close, little lone I don’t want to take the chance of falling off the steep roof. (link)
  • i was way too hott for them to even see me little lone any one talk to me (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

From counting Google hits, _little lone_ seems to be slightly more common than _little own_. Even though the meaning of _lone_ and _own_ is quite different, we have entered both variants into the same entry: the salient part of the semantical reanalysis seems to be _little_, ie a lack or low degree.

Several of the examples show that the substitution of what would have to be seen as an adjective for the formulaic _let alone_ gives can lead the writer into serious syntactic difficulties, which are resolved more or less felicitously.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/13 |

bare » bear

Chiefly in:   bear-faced lie , bear-knuckled , bear-handed fight , bearbacking

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • I’ve always found that part of the NASA Uber Alles crowd to be very troublesome, thinking that, gosh, it is all sweetness and light down there at JSC, when it’s a bear-knuckled bureaucracy like anything else. (link)
  • Now remember people, the opinions expressed above by the beer columnist do not necessarily reflect those of yours truly. In fact, we often disagree on many subjects, leading to a full on, stripped to the waist, bear-knuckled, single-takedown grudge match. (link)
  • Huber and his supporters were somewhat less comfortable engaging in a bear-knuckled internal political struggle for power than Peters’ adherents. (link)
  • More importantly, my web site (now with over 60,000 visits) has always published my work and conclusions, which you now accuse me of plagiarizing from you ~ which is an absolute bear faced lie. (link)
  • Mr. Burton’s comments don’t suprise me concerning the use of taxes collected from Hotel and Motel operator’s to fund the PDR program. What does suprise me is his statement that if these dollars were not used for PDR purchases that the County tax rate could not be reduced by using these funds to support tourist programs currently being funded out of the County general fund. Shame on you Mr. Burton that is a bear faced lie. (link)
  • Egyptians fought bear-handed against the Arabic swords and were massacred on the streets and inside the churches. (Wikipedia)
  • Due to the state’s opposition to the disorder caused by these popular pastimes, by 1600 the bridge fights in Venice ceased to use sticks and became unarmed brawls called guerre di pugni or “war of the fists”. As with the stick wars, these bear-handed sporting brawls could attract thousands of fighters and tens of thousands of spectators. (link)
  • I can’t think of anyone who would get tested before having sex except dumb people considering bearbacking. Everyone else on the planet would practice safe sex. (soc.motss, Aug 10, 2005)
  • Porn star, publisher bear claws in lawsuits (NY Daily News, headline, April 13, 2005)

Analyzed or reported by:

The substitution of the homophone _bear_ for _bare_ is a very productive source of erroneous spellings. Not all of these will be eggcorns: many may be glitches produced during a moment of distraction.

In the examples above, an underlying concept of bears coming into the semantic mix is, however, likely. A bare-faced lie is certainly particularly ugly or abhorrent, and a fighter with bear knuckles more dangerous than one without. It is also interesting that _bear-handed_ is nearly always found in the context of fighting, rather then in the sense of empty-handed.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/13 |

bald » bold

Chiefly in:   bold-faced lie

Variant(s):  boldface, bold face

Classification: English – nearly mainstream

Spotted in the wild:

  • ACU Challenges John Kerry to Prove His Whopper Is Not a Lie
    The candidate’s claim that he met with foreign leaders looks like boldfaced lie, says ACU’s Lessner (The American Conservative Union, Headline)
  • Bush = Bold-faced liar (link)
  • Those sneaky, seemingly straight shooting, look you in the eye, and bold-faced lie people. We’ve all met one. And even when every instinct is telling you they’re lying, we stand there, nodding and smiling and buying their lies. (link)

People appear to have lost their trust in the veracity of news reporting. Lies are even expected in the boldface letters of headlines, as it is illustrated by this Boondocks cartoon (which uses the term as a pun).

_Bold-faced_ has made it into WordNet, which lists the following glosses:

>audacious, barefaced, bodacious, bold-faced, brassy, brazen, brazen-faced, insolent — (unrestrained by convention or propriety; “an audacious trick to pull”; “a barefaced hypocrite”; “the most bodacious display of tourism this side of Anaheim”- Los Angeles Times; “bold-faced lies”; “brazen arrogance”; “the modern world with its quick material successes and insolent belief in the boundless possibilities of progress”- Bertrand Russell)

A variant of the original idiom is _bare-faced lie_. It is, according to this thread from the WORD-L mailing list, used in Britain, but also in parts of the United states. Just like _bald-faced_, _bare-faced_ lends itself to eggcornological reinterpretation and therefore gets an entry of its own.

| 3 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/13 |

per se » per say

Classification: English – cross-language

Spotted in the wild:

  • The self-titled debut isn’t bad, per say, but it does have a guilty-pleasure feel that may have been better received in the hazy days of summer. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 14, 2005)
  • Resident Sara Torre said, “I’m not concerned about the Wal-Mart per say, but I’m concerned about the scope of the project and the location.” (Capital News 9, 2005/1/2)
  • “We really are on track, we’re not in a crisis,” Morrison said. “We don’t need a change agent per say, we want someone who’s going to stay with this vision that’s working.” (Marshfield Mariner, February 9, 2005)

Analyzed or reported by:

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/12 |
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