The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

On May 15, 2005, Christophe B. enquired via e-mail:

> Are you interested only in written or also spoken eggcorns?
>
> I am very intrigued by some wods I hear spoken by people who are intelligent but who clearly do not read, so that they use words from a average- to advanced vocabulary in a way that reflects having only heard them… an example of this is one I often hear: “Sandscript” (for Sanskrit). […]

Well, first of all thanks for the excellent eggcorn _Sanskrit»sandscript_. The examples show that it does indeed exist in written form as well, with the variants _sand script_ and _sandscrit_.

Second, Christophe’s question is an interesting one. To me, a reshaping of any aspect of a word or idiom (spelling, pronunciation, …) that is clearly linked to a new way to make sense of the original material, is much more eggcornish than a random misspelling that just happens to coincide with a pre-existing term. This would be true even in cases where the spelling _doesn’t_ change (where homographs, like _tear_/_tear_ etc., are involved): these would then have to be classified as “hidden eggcorns”.

Palmer pointed out a poster’s use of “Go on, get your nipples in a twist” earlier that day, adding that “Google(tm) provides 389 hits, as against 193,000 for the standard knickers (also, 1,430 for nickers, 79 for snickers, 154 for knockers, and 19 for niggers).” The (primarily) British idiom is undoubtedly opaque to American speakers unfamiliar with “knickers” ‘underpants’, and “nipples”, which is phonetically very close to “knickers”, makes some (painful) sense.

The Urban Dictionary laconically states:

> down packed is just a more common variation of its sister phrase “down pat,” meaning to have something memorized or perfected.

[Note added by Arnold Zwicky, 15 May 2006: Some of the attested examples are clearly just misspellings of “thumbs”: “This wonderful hitchhiking odyssey is all thumps up (or outstretched as the young boy would tell us).” (link) But among the many thousands of others are surely some in which “thumps” is intended to refer to either blows or noises made by thumping.]

“Chute” ’sloping channel or slide to convey things downward (often for disposal)’ is a homophone of “shoot”, and since things often shoot along down a chute, “shoot” is a natural replacement for the otherwise unmotivated “chute” — so natural, indeed, that the New Oxford American Dictionary (2nd ed.) lists it as an alternative to “chute”. The third citation, from a U.K. rivers site, probably shows some influence of the verb “shoot” in “shoot the rapids”.

This one’s not in the standard lists of often-confused words.