The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

I’m not sure this qualifies, but this morning on WFCR (Amherst station for National Public Radio), a reporter was talking about some local government squabble in Hartford. He used the term “holy cows” instead of “sacred cows.”

[Reclassified by Ben Zimmer as “not an eggcorn,” since it doesn’t really fit our working definition. One idiom has been confused with another due to the synonymous nature of “sacred” and “holy,” but there’s no phonetic similarity between the two forms.]

The first cite was provided by Neil Crawford on ADS-L. “I shutter to think” was also reported in a comment by Nigel Morphine on this site (24 February 2005). Googling “I shutter” nets quite a few web occurrences.

It could just be a misspelling, turning on American intervocalic flapping, which makes “shutter” and “shudder” homophones, or nearly so. The question is whether users of this spelling think shutters are involved. Lacking evidence one way or the other, I’ve marked it as “questionable”.

Alison Murie’s ADS-L query about the first cite led me to 561 Google hits, almost all of which look like genuine replacements for the idiom “whale away at” — involving the verb “whale”, which is of uncertain etymology but seems to have nothing to do with whales. Replacement by “wail” at least introduces a component of tear-producing pain resulting from striking or beating, a component that is especially vivid in the second cite above.

Pointed out to me in e-mail (4 June 2005) by David Fenton, who supplied the first cite above. I got 7,360 raw Google web hits for “touch a chord”, but only 608 for “touch a cord”, and many of them were about physically touching a cord of some kind — an electric cord, a cord of wood. But many were clearly re-workings of “touch a chord”, with “cord” understood as some fiber of a person’s being.

This is, of course, the reverse of “cord” >> “chord”, q.v.

I’ve marked this as “questionable” because it’s often hard to distinguish references to chewy nuggets of things from references to chewy nougat (literally, as in the first two examples, or metaphorically, as in the third). The word “nugget” is, of course, much more frequent and less specialized than “nougat”, so a reshaping would be natural.