chord » cord
Spotted in the wild:
- “But in this case I wanted to speak my thoughts to lots of people, so I matched style to audience. And got about 50 letters of people for whom I’d “touched a cord” etc.” (link)
- “He shows her photographs of his hometown, which touch a cord in her heart, and she agrees to marry him and move to Gopher Prairie.” (link)
- “Unsworth’s enormously diverse body of works has the capacity to touch a cord in most people.” (link)
Pointed out to me in e-mail (4 June 2005) by David Fenton, who supplied the first cite above. I got 7,360 raw Google web hits for “touch a chord”, but only 608 for “touch a cord”, and many of them were about physically touching a cord of some kind — an electric cord, a cord of wood. But many were clearly re-workings of “touch a chord”, with “cord” understood as some fiber of a person’s being.
This is, of course, the reverse of “cord” >> “chord”, q.v.