The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

This sometimes appears as a pun, but the above examples (and many others on the Web) are evidently unironic.

Marked “questionable” because potentially the product of a simple typo (typing one “t” instead of two). On the other hand, _kick but_ and its variants is apparently not uncommon.

Note that _butt naked_ itself counts as a (”nearly mainstream”) eggcorn. See also _nip in the butt_.

Anderson supplied the first cite above (which also has the wonderful “have no better time than to VP”, presumably some kind of syntactic blend).

Even if you’re familiar with the word “nit” ‘egg or young of a louse’, you might well not realize that it participates in the idiom family “pick nits” , “nit(-)pick”, “nitpicking”. On the other hand, knitting requires meticulous attention to detail, plus occasionally picking apart previous work to fix errors, so the reinterpretation of “nit” as “knit” in expressions referring to concern with insignificant details is entirely natural. A web Google search produces thousands of examples.

[Edit, CW, 2005/10/14: Added _knitwit_. The occurrences are puns most of the time, such as in several knitting- and crafts-related trademarks; but some are genuine.]

Siemon came across “Seeing my face run the gamete from shock to anger…” in soft-core porn of a pretentiously “literary” variety, then Googled and came across a surprisingly large corpus. A web search on 10 September 2005 pulled up ca. 227 pages for “run”, 323 for “runs”, 57 for “running”, and 82 for “ran”. With as yet no access to people who use the spelling GAMETE, I’ve marked this one as questionable: how do people pronounce GAMETE in this context, and do they think there’s some connection to reproductive cells?

In non-technical English, the word “gamut” is pretty much restricted to this one idiom, and most people don’t know about its etymological connection to musical scales, so it’s open to reshaping. In any case, the spelling GAMUT, with its single M and with U representing schwa, is odd, so you’d expect spelling errors, and in fact misspellings of “gamut” are fairly frequent. Here are some Google web figures for “run the ___” (as of 10 September 2005):

Vowel U preserved:

gamut (correct spelling) over a million
gammut 682
gamutt 22
gamute 27
gammute 0

Vowel E:

gamet 3,100
gammet 1,740
gamett 1
gamete 227 (as above)
gammete 0

Vowel I:

gamit 783
gammit 1,090
gamitt 0
gamite 0
gammite 0

Vowel O:

gamot 860
gammot 677
gamott 1
gamote 0
gammote 0

Vowel A:

gamat 63
gammat 70
gamatt 0
gamate 2
gammate 9

There are two clear tendencies in the misspellings: to double the M; and to use the vowel E preferentially, I or O less preferentially, A or U least preferentially. The moderately frequent misspelling GAMETE doesn’t double the M but does use the vowel E. However, it also has a final E, which is otherwise a rare feature of the misspellings; note that GAMMETE gets no hits. I suggest that these facts indicate that writers recognize that GAMETE is the spelling for a word of English — the other misspellings are not standard spellings of English words — which is then available (despite its own oddities of spelling) for the idiom “run the ___” ‘cover a complete range or extent’.

Which is only to argue that GAMETE can be expected as an occasional misspelling of “gamut”. It doesn’t attain eggcorn status unless we can show that there are some speakers who think that the word “gamete” is somehow involved in the idiom.

See also run the gambit.