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holds » holes

Chiefly in:   no holes barred

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • Shakespeare’s classic romantic tragedy is transformed into a no-holes barred, punk-inflected Elizabethan stage send-up of the story of a doomed love. (hollywood.com, movie blurb)
  • This film is a must for Sean Bean fans, it shows him as a violent no holes barred villain. (lovefilm.com, DVD review)
  • “It is a testimony to the strength of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series and the entire Chevrolet Silverado effort when you are able to get support from an organization the caliber of Rodeway Inn/Econo Lodge,” Labonte concluded. “Having a high-energy, no-holes-barred group like Trick Pony on the side of our truck couldn’t be more perfect for the Martinsville race.” (BobbyLabonte.com, 7 August, 2005)
  • “Dumb Girls,” is a self-deprecating, no holes barred look at about getting hoodwinked in the romantic wars. (Todays Women in Music)
  • Only in India would Clinton get this kind of no holes barred response. (ZNet Daily Commentary, April 17, 2000)
  • Their advice is conveyed through powerful prose sparked with humor, and stunning, no-holes-barred poetry. (U Pittsburgh Press, book review, March 23, 2003)
  • Out of eight episodes Marty shot, we selected five of the best including the double-training of two brothers, Roman and Sascha Chaykin, and a training for an everything-goes no-holes-barred orgy. (ohghurl.com, DVD review)

Analyzed or reported by:

Ken Lakritz calls this eggcorn “extremely common”, and this is true in terms of search engine hits.

_No holes barred_ also occurs particularly often on sites that advertise pornography. These pages would provide excellent examples — all variations on the theme of _no-holes-barred sex_ — if it was possible to distinguish between bona-fide eggcorn usage and (rather crude) wordplay. The “holes” in these cases are obviously understood as the vagina, the mouth and the anus.

See also _no holds barrel_.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/08/07 |

Adam » atom

Chiefly in:   know so. from atom

Classification: English – /t/-flapping – proper names – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • Gee, look, assholes, the world’s now a different place and your situation has so much improved b/c you killed defenseless citizens that didn’t know you from atom and have no bearing on whatever bullshit persecutions you feel you’ve faced. (filmrot.com, comment, July 7, 2005)
  • Or you don’t know me from atom and you’ve only just discovered my blog today, but you are impressed with how utterly confident I sound in propounding my hypothesis, so you figure I must be right and you start telling everybody you meet that they should read “The Thinking Toolbox” because it is the best book ever written on the subject. (Christian Logic.com Catalog)
  • Eminem had a track, which was dope. But they shaped the sound of that record and fucked the game up. Now here comes a ni99a like me comes along. He don’t know me from atom, man. (Interview with 9th Wonder, October 30, 2003)
  • Someone who talks shit about me and faces me afterwards gains respect from me even if I don’t like what they have to say. While someone who hides behind the scenes and doesn’t know me from atom but talks shit about me just makes me wonder if they need to get a life. (Les Femmes Cafe, guestbook entry)
  • Don’t know you from atom. I have no problem with you. (alt.sys.pc-clone.packardbell, Nov 9, 1998)

I had the idea of searching for this eggcorn when I heard a speaker from Scotland talk about people who “don’t know him from Adam” (presumably) with a pronunciation that sounded like _atom_.

Arnold Zwicky pointed out in e-mail that this is also a potential case of a /t/-flapping substitution, which is typical for American English.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/08/06 |

woe is » woeth

Chiefly in:   woeth me

Classification: English – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • “The 40-minute documentary is not a woeth-me, self-righteous trip of blame and disgust at men, but a well-crafted and humorous tale of action and reaction to the Yale women’s stance on equality and those affected beyond 1976.” (link)
  • “I dont know. Im not sure about anything these days. Oh woeth me.” (link)
  • “I feel as though you have bared my soul to the world. I am currently attempting to slit my wrists, but alas the effect I desired cannot be obtained with a ruler. OH WOETH ME!!!!” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Tommy Grano (e-mail of 4 August 2005)

Grano first came across the wonderful “woeth me” in a transcription of speech in a large corpus he was working with. Then he found some web occurrences and suggested that “because people recognize “woe is me” as sounding archaic, it would make sense for them that “woe” could be a verb, and take an archaic verb inflection.”

[CW, 2005-08-23: See also _Whoa is me!_]

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/08/05 |

by and by » bye and bye

Classification: English – nearly mainstream – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Children it’s bye, bye, better bye and bye / We will understand it better bye and bye.” (link)
  • “You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.” (link)
  • “I said bye and bye I’m going to see the King Bye and bye I am going to see the King … Bye and bye I will hear the angel sing And I don’t mind dying, …” (link)
  • “The Chippendales would get their money bye and bye, he replied. “Bye and bye!” she shrieked like a jackdaw. “We’ll need a joint of beef a damn sight sooner…” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Jim Heckman (sci.lang posting of 4 August 2005)

“Bye” occurs occasionally as a variant spelling of “by”, including in the idiom “by and by” ‘in a while’ (for which the OED has cites from 1330, in the modern sense from 1526; the OED has no separate entry for “bye and bye”). But, especially in hymns and folk songs, the expression “bye-bye” (from “good-bye”, from “god be with you”, with no involvement of “by” at all) seems to have been imported into the spelling of “by and by”, no doubt because it contributes its sense of saying farewell (to this bad world). This is pretty clearly the case in my first cite.

The spelling “bye and bye” is frequent: 45,700 raw Google webhits, as against 642,000 for “by and by”. These counts are inflated by many repeated appearances of lines from songs — but both counts are inflated, and by many of the same songs.

In a further interesting twist, people occasionally declare that “by(e) and by(e)” means ‘in the past’. This might be a consequence of the janus-faced nature of “bye-bye”, which looks both into the past and towards the future.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/08/05 |

hue and cry » human cry

Classification: English – and «» in/en – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • There was literally a human cry from around the state during the hearings held on this Issue in House H&SS Committee. (Mental Health Assoc. in Alaska, Bridges Final Report, 2000)
  • This raised a human (?) cry in Boston and throughout the United States. (Kennedy Library, Race in the Military forum transcript, Nov. 12, 2001)
  • The January 23 CyberAlert distributed earlier today quoted CNN’s Wolf Blitzer as declaring: “There’s been an international human cry and it continues over the condition of Afghan war detainees being held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.” CyberAlert reader Tom Johnson suggested to me that Blitzer probably said “hue and cry,” not “human cry.” (Media Research Center, CyberAlert Extra, Jan. 23, 2002)
  • “Please join me in raising a human cry,” said Val J. Peter, executive director of Girls and Boys Town. (Associated Press, Nov. 15, 2002)

Analyzed or reported by:

| 3 comments | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/08/04 |
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