The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

I found this in the comments to a blog (I didn’t note which one). I collect what I call ‘bloggos’ - unusual word usages I find that seem to pop up often in blogs. The complete sentence was:

I don’t have the numbers, but by enlarge, I believe older guys date younger girls.

All I can remember is that the writer seemed very literate, aside from this one slip. A Google search finds over 50,000 hits for the expression, including, for example:

Endoscopic drainage, by enlarge, fails to achieve these principles

which comes from an academic paper, here:

http://www.joplink.net/prev/200311/01.html

A cross-language eggcorn, first brought to my attention by David Fenton in soc.motss (on 28 August 2004), who recalled the “pre-fix menu” he encountered at a D.C. restaurant a few years ago. Well, the cost is fixed ahead of time, right? Slightly Frenchier is “pre-fixe”, as in the example above. I reported these sightings in Postcards from Eggcornea on Language Log.

Here in Palo Alto, the University South News (written by Elaine Meyer) noted on 11 February 2005:

About Language. The advertisement for a prefix dinner is back! But it has improved: it is now a pre-fixe dinner. Optimists that we are, we celebrate progress, no matter how modest.

—–

Rationalizing the modifier as a participle (or, possibly, “restoring” the deleted past participle suffix) then gives us “prefixed”. Ed Keer reported wryly to ADS-L on 17 December 2004: “On my lunch walk today I passed a restaurant advertising “prefixed menu.” I don’t know what they have against bare roots.”

[Jeanette Winterson writes:

In New York I passed a Vietnamese restaurant with a board offering a Pre Fix Menu. I went inside to ask about this, and was told what you’d expect about the food prices, so I asked why they called it a Pre Fix. “Yeah,” said the guy, “we fix the Specials of the Day every morning, but before we fix those, we fix the set menu of the day, so that’s why it’s called a Pre Fix.” So now you know.

B.Z.]

From Jim Landau on ADS-L, 12 December 2004: “A favorite of mine is “Grumman’s Chinese Theater”, which presumably hosted
the premiete of the movie “Top Gun”.”

Not an eggcorn, strictly speaking, but still a reshaping in which an unfamiliar item is replaced by a more familiar one (for someone who knows more about the aerospace industry than about Hollywood).

Wilson Gray supplied the example above (from Harry’s Blues Lyrics OnLine, Home Page) to ADS-L on 31 December 2004. Larry Horn noted, “this one is endemic, as is its mirror-image (“past” for “passed”).” And I added, “indeed. and it’s hard to tell whether these are eggcornic or just spelling errors. the semantics is close, and they were originally the same word. see MWDEU on ‘passed, past’.”

See also passed » past.

First pointed out to me by Brian Joseph on 8 January 2005. On 11 January there were ca. 19,500 Google web hits.

Possibly a blend of “far be it from X” and “it’s not for X”, both of which take infinitival complements. This analysis is suggested by the fact that the first idiom seems to be most comfortable in the first-person singular (??”Far be it from Kim/you/anyone to complain!”), while the second is not so constrained (”It’s not for Kim/you/anyone to complain!”), and “far be it for” is like the second:

(For what it’s worth, on 16 March 2005 I got ca. 601 Google web hits for “far be it for him”. Much less that for “far be it for me”, but not close to zero.)

[Entry updated following Tom Rossen’s comment. I have added a persistent link (free registration required) to the archived NYT editorial, which starts with the quoted sentence. CW, Aug 9, 2005]