aisle » isle

Chiefly in:   walk down the isle

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • I walked the isles looking for snacks, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about him. (link)
  • He was simply to shy to walk down the isle to the preacher at the Baptist church. (link)
| 2 comments | link | entered by carthik, 2005/04/02 |

sphere » spear

Chiefly in:   spear of influence

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • [Israel] functions today as a “virtual offshore U.S. military base,” in the words of Chomsky, and is the prime American foothold in the region, the tip of the spear of American influence in the Middle East. (link)
  • So this is hezb Allah, the Party of God, the spear of Iranian influence in the Levant and chief local enforcer of Syria’s occupation of Lebanon. (link)
  • At this point, I was not even really concerned with the Platts. They were little more than a nuisance… Something I could deal with. Until they demonstrated just how far their spear of influence punctured the heart of ST. (link)
  • Over the past eighteen months, Russia and China have been joining together to form their own spear of influence on their side of the globe. (link)
  • There is one area we all have to be conscious of, and perhaps through our own spear of influence we may be able to assist with, is that we are seeing more and more PTSD cases coming than we ever have before. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

This is one of the eggcorns that show how word choice can slide under the pressure of what could be called the metaphoric potential of a word. For _sphere_ and _spear_, these are quite different: a sphere is a container, homogeneous, round, can grow or shrink; a spear is long and pointed, a weapon.

The substitution _sphere»spear_ can occur as a spell checking artifact, too. But none the less it looks like a genuine eggcorn for at least some writers.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/04/02 |

harebrained » hairbrained

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Can of Worms: Hairbrained scheme defeats robot army. By Kalli Anderson.” (link)
  • ‘Hairbrained scheme’. One old lady, who was one of the first pedestrians to use the new crossing in … It’s a hairbrained scheme and most dangerous.” (link)

The involvement of rabbits in this idiom seems to be non-obvious to a great many speakers; “hairbrained” gets ca. 10k raw Google web hits to ca. 50k for “harebrained” (1 April 2005). The much more frequent “hair” is giving the rarer “hare” a serious race for its money. The semantics seems to involve hair as inconsequential, fluffy, silly.

See also other “hare”/”hair”-related entries.

James Cochrane, Between You and I, labels this a spelling error. Perhaps it is for some people.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/04/02 |

invisible » invincible

Chiefly in:   the invincible hand

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • According to Adam Smith, market has an ability to manage itself by the “invincible hand”. (link)
  • Even in a full-dress market economy like the United States, the “invincible hand” of market forces of demand and supply is not necessarily the “Hand of God”. (link)
  • We are essentially back to the age of Adam Smith who believed in the “invincible hand of the markets”. (link)
  • Would you agree with me that the purpose of regulation, therefore, is basically to stand in the place of what I believe was referred to as the invincible hand of the marketplace? (link)
  • During the past decade, the foreign exchange market has been the invincible hand guiding the purchase and sale of goods, services and raw materials in every corner of the globe. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

References to the or an “invincible hand” are common in the contexts of card games and religion. From there they appear to have spread into economics.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/04/01 |

bouillon » bullion

Chiefly in:   bullion cube

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Cook for about 10 minutes over a moderate flame, seasoning with the crumbled bullion cube. (link)
  • 1 vegetarian bullion cube, prepared according to package directions (typically, 1 cube is combined with 2 cups water) (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

As noted by Ken Lakritz, this is a common error. The search engines turn up hundreds of links to recipes.

It is not entirely clear whether we have a simple hesitation about the correct spelling of _bouillon_. But in this case, we might expect the form _boullion_, which is indeed just about as frequent as _bullion_. To bolster the eggcorn hypothesis we note that bouillon cubes come in an individual gold or silver wrapping at least in some parts of the world, and do slightly resemble miniature ingots.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/04/01 |