The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

See also tale » tail.

The misspelling _tale_ for _tail_ (_”now take the fish by the head and tale”_) is also very common in contexts where a semantic reinterpretation looks unlikely.

Personal anecdote: I once was advised by a native speaker of English to avoid _make head and tail of sth._ because of the “sexual connotation”.

[Entry edited following Ben Zimmer’s comment. I wonder if there is a BrE/AmE split — I had definitely read the form _make head and tail of sth_ before. CW.]

Horn writes:

Understandable enough, given the current opacity of the connection of “sell NP down the river” with the slave trade (and not, I gather, with the prison at Sing Sing) and the association of sailing with rivers, not to mention the phonology. But an eggcorn it is.

Unsurprisingly, the substitution _bat » batter_ is more common in _batter an eyelid_ than in _batter an eye_.

According to AHD4, _bat_ is “probably” a variant of _bate_, which is already involved in the eggcorn _baited breath_.

So far it seems to be mostly a kid thing. But they’ll be adults soon…

Rapaport’s posting:

Has anyone noticed the use of “versus” as a verb, as in:

“I versed him in Yu-Gi-Oh yesterday.”

“Who are you versing in the tournament?”

It seems to come from a misunderstanding, based on pronunciation, of “versus” as “verses” (i.e., of a Latin term misheard as an English
3rd-person verb): The headline “Michael vs. Tyler” is heard as the active sentence “Michael verses Tyler”.

I first heard this within the last year from my 9-year-old son and his friends. They define it as “to battle”.

West’s mail:

My 8-year-old son says this quite often, and not just in the context of the dreaded trading card games (Yu-Gi-oh, Pokemon, etc.) When he’s reading the sports pages he’ll say things like “The Patriots versed Green Bay.” Or “I’ll verse you in chess.” I’ve always assumed it to be as you say a faulty analysis of versus as a verb. If you really want, I’ll listen more closely next time. I think I’ve also heard him use it with a preposition.

Mellow as quoted by Bierma:

My son, and in fact every other child in my area who is involved in sports, uses a verb to indicate which team he is competing against: “to verse,” as in, “Who are we versing tonight?” Or, “We versed the Dodgers yesterday.” It obviously derives from the Latin preposition “versus.”

I had thought the use of this word in this way was peculiar to my town or at least only to the north/northwest suburbs [of Chicago]. What I found very interesting is that when I did a Web search on it I found the exact same word occurring as far away as Australia. Language is an amazing organic thing.

[Both occurrences on ESPN.com are taken from articles written by the same journalist, Len Pasquarelli.]

A great number of the occurrences of this eggcorn look like blends of the idiom _tried and true_ and the adjective _trite_. There are also examples that employ all three elements:

* Having determined that a truly polite garden is one that is safe, subdued, doesn’t incite undue envy and isn’t likely to disturb the onlooker, she is in a quandary about how to remedy her yard without resorting to the tried, the true and the trite. (link)

There is nothing illogical about, say, a cliché or a film script being at the same time trite and, at least in the opinion of the writer, true. Examples of this only marginally eggcornish usage and of another very common combination of the two adjectives, “trite, but true”, abound:

* What is trite and true about love applies as well to politics: It takes two to tango. (link)
* We begin to know that “As a man thinketh so is he” is a very trite and true saying in regard to his financial affairs, as well as everything else. (link)
* It’s trite but true: voters hate disunity. (link)

The juxtaposition of _trite_ and _true_ is not recent. A page that collects quotes falsely attributed to Winston Churchill has the following citation from his book _Great Contemporaries_ (London & New York, 1937, last reprinted 1990), which is a quote Churchill attributes to Arthur J. Balfour:

> ‘there were some things that were true, and some things that were trite; but what was true was trite, and what was not trite was not true’