The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Doug Wilson reported “hundreds of Web examples”, and Larry Horn added: “I’ve been using that one for years, at least since a 1994 “Words and Meaning” final exam, so it’s been around that long. I first came across it on a religious web site, of all places, in the gerundive form (”lip-singing”).” Wilson noted that “lip-sung” and “lip-sang” were also to be found (see examples 3 and 4 above) — and “lip-singed” as well (example 5 above). Examples 1 and 2 are from Ken Lakritz’s commentary in the Eggcorn Database.

Lakritz explained the motivation for the eggcorn: “Lip-syncing is the practice of pretending to sing by synchronizing your lip movements with a vocal soundtrack. This gets turned into ‘lip-singing,’ which I would understand as appearing to sing with your lips but without a voice, i.e., much the same thing.” It might be that some people are unaware of the fact that the “sync(h)” of “lip-sync(h)” is a clipping of “synchronize”/”synchronization”.

In the Eggcorn Forum, melmike writes:

“Diarrhetic” is a word: an adjective form of “diarrhea”. But even Google’s Adsense equates it with “diuretic”. We did find some other examples of this eggcorn in Google, but difficult to quantify without a lot of research (as many of the hits were re correct use of the word). However, we suspect that many folks who use “diarrhetic” for “diuretic” are not familiiar with the meaning of the existing “diarrhetic” and assume that, because a diuretic removes water from the body, sort of like diarrhea does, that the words are related.

[Edited by Ben Zimmer, 5 June 06: Marked questionable, since it’s unclear whether this is categorizable as an eggcorn. It would appear to be more of a back-formation, reanalyzing offend as offen + -ed. (Compare, for instance, the word mix, a historical back-formation from mixt.)]

Peters wrote, “I heard Reggie Miller say this one during a TNT NBA playoff game, and sure enough, it’s out there”, and supplied the four examples above.

No doubt many people fail to connect the “bog” part of “be bogged down” to wet, muddy bogs and so substitute the verb “boggle”, with its implication of inability to act, for it, losing in the process the astonishment aspect of boggling.

Parish reported on ADS-L: “In this morning’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, there’s an AP story on Sen. Harry Reid, who accepted a questionable gift from the Nevada Athletic Commission. Kathleen Clark, an expert on congressional ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, is quoted as saying” the first cite above. Parish added: “If it’s a deliberate coinage - above being approached? - it strikes me as halfway clever, but there’s a definite eggcornish flavor to it.”

Eliminating duplicates, I found 88 Google webhits for “X above approach”, where X is a form of be. Most of them are relevant, and almost all of those look inadvertent.

“Above approach” is certainly a malaprop, with the relatively rare “reproach” replaced by the very common “approach”, but I’ve marked this one as “questionable” as an eggcorn because I’m not sure how approaching enters into the perceived meaning of the idiom, especially with reference to abstractions rather than persons. However, the last of the “above approach” cites, with its explanation that “no one can come” [i.e. approach] and question the writer’s manner of life, suggests a possible contribution. And maybe the development of “beyond approach” provides an explanation.

The “beyond approach” webhits include many like the last cite above, in which the expression seems to mean ‘beyond approaching, unapproachable, first-order’ (similar to “beyond compare” ‘beyond comparison, incomparable, first-order’), with no possible reproaching alluded to — presumably the malaprop “beyond approach” reinterpreted more or less literally. The next-to-last cite could go either way, and might represent an intermediate step on the way to literal reinterpretation.