The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

The word ‘foul’ (offensive, noxious, unfair) could often apply to that which is ‘fell’ (fierce, ruthless, terrible, deadly). The above example relating to the forced eviction of settlers in Gaza is such an example. This coincidence of meaning and the words’ similarity in sound combined the low awareness of the word ‘fell’ creates the ideal conditions for an eggcorn.

The Concise Oxford defines ‘at one fell swoop’ as ‘in a single (deadly) action’. Popular use of the phrase and the eggcorn often draws on the ’single action’ part of the meaning only. For example, deleting all items at once from your Microsoft Office clipboard is neither offensive nor deadly. Though it can be done in one single action this swoop would be neither foul nor fell. Hence either meaning is equally [in]appropriate. The same applies to the Between The Lines example.

The Guardian Unlimited book reviewer in another example above may have quite knowingly used the eggcorn because the word foul is so appropriate in the context of a kiss and tell biography.

Media Monitors’ A Case for Ethics talks about ‘a dirty deed’ thus underlining the new meaning of the eggcorn.

In a somewhat self-referencing example, the Christian Times writer used written words improperly and thus partially destroyed some of his own good work.

See also fell»fowl.

[CW, 2005/08/29: marked as “questionable”. The substitution certainly involves a semantic reinterpretation, but phonetically, the distance between _fell_ and _foul_ is rather a stretch.]

It doesn’t help any that “byte” itself is a pun on “bite” and is accompanied by “nybble” (for five four bits) and a few other words in the same vein. “Sound byte” seems to me to be born of our increasinly digitized world; it’s probably more common online than offline.

I have actually used this myself at least once that I know of: a few years ago I was a regular on an Australian media-watching newsgroup and inadvertently used the eggcorn to ask for more information about something I’d seen the night before. It was immediately noticed and commented upon.

Curiously, while googling for a book using the term, I found it used and defended in “Philosophical Practice” by Lou Marinoff:

My pet homonymic peeve—again symptomatic of a culture rendered senseless by fuzzy speech—is named “sound bite”. You think you know what this means, don’t you? If so, then you probably understand its reference, but not its sense. That’s because “sound-bite” is nonsense. The proper name, whos refcerence bears the intended sense, is the homonym “sound-byte.” In the technical language of digital computing, a “byte” is a chunk (or word) of data, typically eight bits in length, which is processed as a single unit of information.

I think but cannot conclusively prove that Marinoff and other defenders of this eggcorn are mistaken about the origins of “sound bite”; I remain confident that it predates readily-available digital storage of sound by some time, and in any event a single byte is not very much information at all, and definitely not enough space to store, say, a 10 or 30-second sound recording from a politician or talking head.

The existence of color-coding - assigning meanings to colors - and color-coating - coating things (paper, metal, etc.) with a coat of color - seems to have led to some confusion about which is which. In some of the above examples, both phrases appear as if interchangeable. After all, if something is color coded, it must be coated with a color, right? Not if it’s not a color coating (which seems to be more of an industrial term) but, say, an item dyed that color.

This is a case where the eggcorn substitution makes just as much sense as the original, replacing turn in the sense of ‘a particular form of expression or peculiarity of phrasing’ with the more common _term_.

See also term » turn.