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jibe » jive

Classification: English – nearly mainstream

Spotted in the wild:

  • Books lend more diversity of faith as well, letting spirituality seekers find a belief system that jives with how they live. (link)
  • Pace said roughly half of his students these days go on to teach, while most of the others end up in business. That jives with data collected by “The College Majors Handbook”… (link)
  • Concordia’s faculty and staff help you during your freshman year to clarify your goals, build great study habits, and create a degree plan that jives with your talents, skills, abilities, and interests. (link)

Washington State University’s Common Errors in English nicely summarizes this eggcorn:

“Gibe” is a now rare term meaning “to tease.” “Jibe” means “to agree,” but is usually used negatively, as in “the alibis of the two crooks didn’t jibe.” The latter word is often confused with “jive,” which derives from slang which originally meant to treat in a jazzy manner (“Jivin’ the Blues Away”) but also came to be associated with deception (“Don’t give me any of that jive”).

| Comments Off link | entered by Thomas W Ping, 2005/07/05 |

squib » squid

Chiefly in:   damp squid

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • I imagine the excitement will last for another few weeks before it peters out into the damp squid that faced the party before Bas’ well-timed theatrics. (Trinidad & Tobago Express, June 12, 2005)
  • Sadly, I can’t see that happening this year and we have to hope there isn’t a runaway title-win for the Doctor leaving the final quarter of the season a relative damp squid. (superbikeplanet.com)
  • After so much excitement and with fans in awe of the new ground, it turned into a damp squid as Chelsea ran out easy 2-0 winners. (link)

I heard a co-worker use this expression and when questioned it became clear that he and several other people thought that damp squid was correct. Many had not heard of a squib and seemed satisfied in the the logic of a squid being damp. They did not know why a damp squid was failure but did think it was something unpleasant. A quick Google using ‘damp squid’ and excluding squib gave 1760 results.

[There also are examples of “damp squid” being used in a sense somewhat close to “wet blanket”:

* _Hate to be the damp squid but I hope that the low cpu usage doesnt come at the expense of sound quality which the reputation of vas was built on?_ (link)

C.W.]

[Jeanette Winterson writes:

I laboured long into adult life really believing that there was such a thing as a “damp squid”, which of course there is, and when things go wrong they do feel very like a damp squid to me, sort of squidgy and suckery and slippery and misshapen. Is a faulty firework really a better description of disappointment?

B.Z.]

| Comments Off link | entered by Sandi, 2005/07/05 |

by ear » by year

Chiefly in:   play it by year

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • today there isn’t a new posting on her site, which i take for a good thing, and she wasn’t crying at lunch. i think i’ll play it by year. (link)
  • Noel our director wants me to start racing pursuit to give it a go this year in LA at the worlds. I am going to play it by year and see how it goes but truly my heart is out on the open roads. (link)
  • With no skiing experience, ski school is definitely a good choice for the kids (at least one day for sure). I’d bet that the older kids will be ready to charge off on their own after 1 day of school and may not need a second day, but play it by year. (link)
  • I really don’t have anything that I am just aching to be, so I am just playing it by year, or ten. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

For speakers who don’t start _ear_ (in _by ear_) with a glottal stop, the eggcorn and the original are homophones. In several of the occurrences, a (more or less vaguely) temporal interpretation of the idiom is discernible.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/07/05 |

scare » scar

Chiefly in:   scarred the heck out of

Classification: English – questionable

Spotted in the wild:

  • My cousin was pouring gas into the carb, when a flame jumped out of the carb and scarred the heck out of him. (link)
  • The first speaker, a Nigerian dentist with his own lucrative waterfront office by the Navy Yards in Washington, DC, scarred the heck out of me when he yanked through the air in an extracting gesture and said, “Politicians, my name is Ribadu and it is teeth extracting time”. (link)
  • We have had a bear take down a moose calf across from our driveway, scarred the heck out of the paperboy. (link)
  • Upset stomach, confusing visuals, rise in body temperature, etc, scarred the heck out of me. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

Marked tentatively as “questionable”, since a blend with “scarred for life” is possible.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/07/04 |

stark raving » stalk raving

Chiefly in:   stalk raving mad

Classification: English – /r/-dropping

Spotted in the wild:

  • Why are there kids playing in the lap pool? That is what the other pool is for!!!! I would be stalk raving mad too!!!! (link)
  • Not only does he express the inner thoughts of Willhelm, yet shows a personal side which expresses the crown prince’s poryphia stricken reduced him to a stalk raving mad wildabeast. Not only was he stalk raving mad, the wildabeast confronted his homosexual tendencies with Eulenburg and Walderee. (amazon.com customer review)
  • They will probably be mobbed by stalk raving mad girls. (link)
  • I’m not a stalk-raving-mad-scientist-full-blown-aficionado-coffeegeek yet….yet. (coffeegeek.com)
  • Then emailed a bunch of Mac applications home, only to have them look like the alphabet gone stalk raving mad (link)
  • You would be surprized at how much one person could listen to the same 3 beatles tapes over and over and over again without going stalk raving mad. (link)

See also _stark raven mad_ and _star-craving mad_.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/07/04 |
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