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flesh » flush

Chiefly in:   flush out

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “I want to arrange a call for Monday or Tuesday to flush out our LPCH requirements and see what we can do given the delay on the test PACS server…” (Stanford interoffice memo, 18 December 2004)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • commenter Christopher Lion (link)

Stanford memo text supplied to me by Terry Moore. This one is hard to Google for, but it’s common enough to have made Paul Brians’s Common Errors in English Usage.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/05/07 |

dog-eat-dog » doggy-dog

Chiefly in:   doggy-dog world

Variant(s):  doggie-dog

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion

Spotted in the wild:

  • Americans are always in a rush, always looking at the clock, never waiting patiently. It’s a doggy dog world out there. (link)
  • Only those nations survive in this doggy dog world that consider their land, language, culture and freedom above all petty differences of religion, social class, and economic standing. (link)
  • the true matter is: it’s a doggy dog world out there and they’re all in it for the money. (link)
  • The guard may have just been saying what he thought was expected of him, but you can certainly see how a doggie dog world leads to homophobia. (link)
  • He took kids and taught them the ways to become successful in this doggie dog world, including me. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

Nicholas W comments:

The phrase was used as a deliberate pun by rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg as a song title on his first album (lyrics here), the meaning, of course, being that he’s “on top of the world.” I’m sure this boosted its use as a genuine eggcorn.

| Comments Off link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/05/07 |

laissez-faire » lazy-fare

Variant(s):  lazy fare

Classification: English – cross-language

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Linda’s dream for the IE Standard is to put in it only what is needed by at least one destination. She wants at all costs to avoid the T. G. lazy-fare to pass through and let the destination figure out what to do.” (Stanford interoffice memo, 17 December 2004)
  • “Lazy-Fare Economics. If you’ll permit me to diverge from the ever-so-interesting topic of the social mal-adjustments and sexual deviancies of…” (link)
  • “Lazy Fare Capitalism is not enough. In our collaboration called government we must be a responsible consumer, employer and…” (link)

The Stanford memo text was supplied to me by Terry Moore. Google provides a few hundred examples.

The idea of laziness, in the sense of ‘taking it easy’, does carry over from “laissez-faire”.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/05/07 |

do » dew

Chiefly in:   make dew

Classification: English – questionable

Spotted in the wild:

  • “We can make dew with the Tal,” said Yoffie, “and reduce this burdensome legal edifice by 50 percent in the process. As a result, we will do away with … (link)
  • “funny song! awesome song! amazing how they can use words from the real song and make dew with them here!” (link)

In comparison to the enormously frequent “make due” (q.v.), “make dew” is rare, and might just be a misspelling. It might even be a misspelling of the eggcorn “make due”!

(Rueful thanks to Ron Butters, who jocularly suggested this one on reading Larry Horn and me on “make due” on ADS-L, 7 May 2005.)

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/05/07 |

pains(-)taking » pain-staking

Variant(s):  pain staking

Classification: English – resyllabification

Spotted in the wild:

  • “After all of my pain-staking labour :) I’ve discovered fontforge will automatically create encoding files for you. (I’m glad I did it all manually coz I learned a fair bit about stuff.)” (link)
  • “This will be a pain staking ordeal. Why you may ask well because my ass … So as I begin this pain staking ordeal…” (link)

The first citation was supplied to me by John McChesney-Young on 16 December 2004. Huge numbers of examples can be Googled up.

A nice recutting, suggesting that “take pains to” is either not as widely known as I’d thought or is often not appreciated as the source of “painstaking”.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/05/07 |
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