The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

The formula “X’s lips are sealed”, used to convey ‘X will not divulge anything’, isn’t hard to work out, but it seems that at least a few people (so far I have only the two cites above) find it opaque and have improved it via the intrusion of the verb “steel” ‘make hard, obdurate’ (or perhaps the noun “steel”, evoking the image of sealing one’s lips with a steel zipper). An intermediate step might be provided by occurrences of the verb “steel” with “lips” as its object, as in these two examples supplied by Chris Waigl:

Naked at Mulder’s feet again. I could really, really get used to this.
But not tonight, dammit. I steeled my lips in a hard line and stood up,
making a Herculean effort not to look at the beautiful, hard, straining
cock right in front of me. (link)

Steeling his lips in a grimace of grim determination, Michael made his
way stoically towards the one place that Nikita could be. (link)

The eggcorn _inherent»inherit_ was submitted via e-mail to Arnold Zwicky by Bill Findlay, who had discovered the spelling “inherit problem” in an e-mail addressed to him.

This triggered a small flurry of messages between several interested parties. Spellings in which a nasal is deleted from or inserted into the standard form are indeed very common, and it is necessary to find the genuine eggcorns (for example _inclimate weather_) among them. Or, as Arnold Zwicky put it:

> [T]he question is whether the semantics of “inherit” is somehow intruding itself into the expression “inherent problem”.

(more…)

The new meaning is ‘a chicken swoop’. Chickens are birds. Birds do swoop. I’m sure the intended meaning is still at least ’single’ (as in ‘a single deadly action - Oxford Concise) but I’m not sure that anyone seriously believes fowl are the most appropriate bird to convey this meaning. This must be the hen that laid the eggcorn;)

See also fell»foul.

[CW, 2005/08/29: marked as “questionable”. The substitution certainly involves a semantic reinterpretation, but phonetically, the distance between _fell_ and _fowl_ is rather a stretch.]

The word ‘foul’ (offensive, noxious, unfair) could often apply to that which is ‘fell’ (fierce, ruthless, terrible, deadly). The above example relating to the forced eviction of settlers in Gaza is such an example. This coincidence of meaning and the words’ similarity in sound combined the low awareness of the word ‘fell’ creates the ideal conditions for an eggcorn.

The Concise Oxford defines ‘at one fell swoop’ as ‘in a single (deadly) action’. Popular use of the phrase and the eggcorn often draws on the ’single action’ part of the meaning only. For example, deleting all items at once from your Microsoft Office clipboard is neither offensive nor deadly. Though it can be done in one single action this swoop would be neither foul nor fell. Hence either meaning is equally [in]appropriate. The same applies to the Between The Lines example.

The Guardian Unlimited book reviewer in another example above may have quite knowingly used the eggcorn because the word foul is so appropriate in the context of a kiss and tell biography.

Media Monitors’ A Case for Ethics talks about ‘a dirty deed’ thus underlining the new meaning of the eggcorn.

In a somewhat self-referencing example, the Christian Times writer used written words improperly and thus partially destroyed some of his own good work.

See also fell»fowl.

[CW, 2005/08/29: marked as “questionable”. The substitution certainly involves a semantic reinterpretation, but phonetically, the distance between _fell_ and _foul_ is rather a stretch.]

It doesn’t help any that “byte” itself is a pun on “bite” and is accompanied by “nybble” (for five four bits) and a few other words in the same vein. “Sound byte” seems to me to be born of our increasinly digitized world; it’s probably more common online than offline.

I have actually used this myself at least once that I know of: a few years ago I was a regular on an Australian media-watching newsgroup and inadvertently used the eggcorn to ask for more information about something I’d seen the night before. It was immediately noticed and commented upon.

Curiously, while googling for a book using the term, I found it used and defended in “Philosophical Practice” by Lou Marinoff:

My pet homonymic peeve—again symptomatic of a culture rendered senseless by fuzzy speech—is named “sound bite”. You think you know what this means, don’t you? If so, then you probably understand its reference, but not its sense. That’s because “sound-bite” is nonsense. The proper name, whos refcerence bears the intended sense, is the homonym “sound-byte.” In the technical language of digital computing, a “byte” is a chunk (or word) of data, typically eight bits in length, which is processed as a single unit of information.

I think but cannot conclusively prove that Marinoff and other defenders of this eggcorn are mistaken about the origins of “sound bite”; I remain confident that it predates readily-available digital storage of sound by some time, and in any event a single byte is not very much information at all, and definitely not enough space to store, say, a 10 or 30-second sound recording from a politician or talking head.