The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Arnold Zwicky quotes an e-mail from Keith Ivey:

> When I first heard the phrase “the die is cast”, I thought it meant that a mold for stamping out coins (for example) had already been produced from molten metal and thus set and could not be changed. I later learned that it referred to throwing a gaming cube. Apparently I’m not alone in having had this misapprehension.

He quotes a web site, supplied by Keith Ivey, too, on which someone states the same conviction about the expression’s origin and meaning:

> Perhaps you have heard the phrase ‘the die is cast’ or ‘the die has been cast’. This has nothing to do with gambling or dice; instead, it refers to a mold (die) which has been cast (made).
>
> Once the mold is made, everything which comes from it, will have the shape of the mold. ‘The die is cast’ thus states that a pattern has been laid down, and thus subsequent events will conform to the pattern. This phrase lends itself to assumptions about the future being predictable, once patterns are seen in the present.

It is easy to find other writers being unsure about this point:

> The Phrase Finder lists the origin of ‘The die has been cast’ as: ‘The die here is a dice. Julius Caesar is supposed to have said this when crossing the Rubicon.’
>
> However, my understanding was that ‘die’ in this case refers to the die used for forming material, and that ‘cast’ here does not mean ‘throw’ but rather ‘to form (molten metal etc.) into a particular shape by pouring into a mold’. So basically once the metal has been poured into the die it will set pretty quickly, and the shape (outcome) will be fixed. (link)

“Hidden” eggcorns are, in their most basic form, reanalyses of the meaning of a word or expression without any change in spelling. This lack of orthographic evidence makes it harder to find indisputable examples. It is quite possible that the authors of the two occurrences that are listed above were aware of the origin of the idiom and just decided to play on the words: we can’t know what they thought. It is, on the other hand, clear that, given the amount of uncertainty about the expression’s origin, genuine hidden eggcorn examples of _the die is cast_ must be out there.

See also _the dye is cast_.

Linda Seebach found the following passage in a letter to the editor (it was changed before publication):

> The pulse of social change is with the News on this one, but you’re too busy fending off the political/economic pinchers of the conservative bug to realize it.

A pincher is someone who pinches. For some people, it’s also, quite reasonably, something that pinches.

Just like the verb _wash_, _leach_ is semantically quite versatile: A contaminant can leach out of the soil (or into the water supply), the soil can leach a contaminant into the water, or water can leach a contaminant out of the soil. The substitution _leach»leech_ occurs for all three cases and is not uncommon.

There is probably an influence of _leech_ in peer-to-peer file sharing. The noun _leech_, metaphorically formed from the blood-sucking animal, designates someone who downloads other file sharers’ offerings without sharing their own files — a strategy that is used to avoid attracting attention of the police, if the file-sharing infringes copyright; in some countries, downloading is or used to be legal when uploading one’s own copyright-protected files isn’t. A verb _leech_ was formed, which is used more often intransitively (”He/she is leeching.”), but also occurs as a transitive verb (”I leeched the file from …”). With technologies that make asymmetric file-sharing impossible, _leech_ is used as an informal synonym of _download_.

In some examples where traditionally _leach_ would be expected, it is hard to tell if the underlying image is that of washing or sucking:

* It soon becomes obvious to the reader that the house is leeching the life out of its occupants, while in the process of revivifying itself. (Amazon customer review)
* Sven Birkerts believes that technology is leeching the spiritual out of human experience. (Wired Magazine, May 1995)

Similar in the example reported by Linda Seebach, from a column by George Will about the EU constitution:

* But whatever the reasons, the result will be salutary because the constitution would accelerate the leeching away of each nation’s sovereignty. (The text appeared in several publications, among others the _Wall Street Journal_ and the _Washington Post_, at the end of May 2005; other sites have quoted the relevant passage.)

Will Rigby reported seeing “There’s a fair few maybes being branded about” in the subtitles of the opening episode of
the two-part film “Class of ‘76″.

The eggcorn doesn’t work for all grammatical usages of _bandy about_: The final /i/ sound has to be present in the eggcorn. _Branded about_, most of the time as a passive, yields several hundred occurrences on the web. The past tense or the -ing form _branding about_ are less frequent.

The connection appears to be the idea of giving something prominence, just as brand names do for products.

See also bantied about.

Wilson Gray quoted, “We were taken to parties in stretch limos with drivers, free drinks,
and everything. Money was no option.” And I was off on a Google web search, which netted huge numbers of relevant occurrences of “money is/was no option”.

The contribution of “object” to the semantics of “money is/was no object” — (the availability of) money is no barrier, meaning money doesn’t have to be considered, any amount can be spent — seems to be hard for many people to tease out, and they settle on “no option” (conveying, I guess, that there’s no need to choose on the basis of monetary considerations) as making more sense.