The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

In this eggcorn, the reanalysis is evident only in the way the word is punctuated. The original form, sing-along, is quite transparent, so I suspect that the reanalysis is not motivated by the sense of the word so much as by analogy with “V-a-N” constructions such as Rent-A-Wreck, rope-a-dope, and whack-a-mole.

I’ve labelled this one as “nearly mainstream,” because the reanalyzed form seems to be very common. As of this writing, the query “sing-a-long gets approximately a third as many hits on Google as the query “sing-along”, although it should be noted that, since Google treats hyphens and spaces as interchangeable, the hit counts will include things like “I run out of air if I have to sing a long note” and “Feel free to sing along.”

Another confounding factor here is an outfit called Sing-a-long-a, which puts on sing-along screenings of the film The Sound of Music (”the ultimate communal nun-based karaoke“). These events go under the official title Sing-a-Long-a Sound of Music, but the second “-a” is often omitted by reviewers, as in this article by Beth Nissen at CNN.com.

Linda Seebach, editorial writer at the _Rocky Mountain News_, supplied the example from Daniel Drezner’s blog.

The words _squeamish_ and _squirm_ both have comparatively unclear etymologies, but don’t appear to spring from a common origin. The former is several centuries older than the latter.

Sometimes, _squirmish_ can be found where the noun _skirmish_ would be expected. An example from and interview transcript on ABC Online, Australia:

> The story of the appointment of Robert Gerard has become a proxy leadership squirmish between supporters of Peter Costello and John Howard.

I have frequently heard this in spoken use (as in “we have to submit an in-term report after 6 months and a final report at the end of the project”), but was never quite sure if this was just a mispronunciation. However, a Google search turned up 105 examples of “in-term report”, showing that at least some people believe this is the correct spelling. There were 4,460,000 hits for “interim report”. The eggcorn version does make intuitive sense - it sounds like a report that one writes within the term of a project, as opposed to a final report that you write when the project is finished. The actual derivation is of course from Latin, “ad interim” = “in the mean time”.

_[Edited and posted, CW, 2005/11/14.]_

Two remarks. (1) I have categorized this, quite hesitantly, as “vocalized /l/”; I invite correction or amplification on this point. (2) Somewhat unusually for this database (as far as I know–again, I invite correction), the third of these cited occurrences–”we walked and we moved on our…on our fours (knees and hands)”–is from transcribed speech, namely, an oral history “made by Robert Shuster and Steve Gertz and … completed in November 1993″ (Shuster was and is the archivist of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, Illinois, USA); the notes before the transcription make it clear that the “…” represents the speaker pausing, and that the gloss “(knees and hands)” was the speaker’s, not the transcribers’.