The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Maybe French crawlers crawl right into your mouth and then into your belly.

The reverse of “do” >> “due” in “make due”, and, like it, probably dependent on a homophony between “do” and “due”, but (as commenter Doug Orleans notes) more likely to be just a spelling error, since it’s hard to see any semantic contribution from “do”. Now (as of 13 July 2005) Chris Waigl notes some semantic support for the reanalysis: “undo influence” might be seen as destructive, or leading to the disintegration (that is, undoing) of something.

Presumably from people who have “due” and “do” as homophones. The idiom “make do” is pretty opaque, and I guess that “due” provides some sense of obligation to the expression.

Google provides thousands of examples, among them the fourth cite above.

[Edited on 7/20/05 to add _due or die_, with examples. This manifestation of the eggcorn often appears in contexts relating to a “crunch time” when something falls due.]

See also due » do.

The third citation was provided to me on 7 May 2005 by John McChesney-Young and caused me to search Google for other occurrences of “bi-law”. I’ve labeled it as “questionable” because I’m not clear about how people who use this spelling think twoness enters into the meaning of the expression. Maybe they think there’s a first, main, set of laws, and then there’s a second set, the bi-laws. Or maybe it’s just a misspelling.

Ann Burlingham observed on soc.motss on 6 May 2005 that “vocal chords” outnumbers “vocal cords” by a good bit on Google, even on a music dictionary site.

Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage notes, “The chord spelling can still be found in American sources in combination with spinal and more frequently with vocal, where the unrelated musical chord may affect people’s spelling.” It’s the association with musical chords that makes this possibly an eggcorn. But MWDEU notes that “the chord spelling with adjectives like vocal and spinal is historically justified and considered acceptable by a number of British authorities”. However, since “it is widely understood to be a misspelling in American usage”, they recommend the cord spelling.

[Update: 18 October 2007, Ben Zimmer] More about vocal c(h)ords on OUPblog here and here.

[Update: 7 November 2007, Arnold Zwicky] And now Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words (#542, 2 June 2007) reports starter chord: “This past weekend,” notes Michael Shannon, “I participated in a course for the use and care of chainsaws. Now, chainsaws are often accused of making awful noises, so I found it highly amusing that the printed material we were given constantly referred to pulling on ‘the starter chord’. Unfortunately, we weren’t told what key it was in.”

[Update: 6 June 2009, Arnold Zwicky] More from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words (#641, 30 May 2009): Jenny O’Brien tells us the St Cloud Times of Minnesota reported on Friday 22 May: “A fire started by an old electrical chord caused smoke damage late Thursday to a mobile home in southeast St Cloud.”