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harebrained » hairbrained

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Can of Worms: Hairbrained scheme defeats robot army. By Kalli Anderson.” (link)
  • ‘Hairbrained scheme’. One old lady, who was one of the first pedestrians to use the new crossing in … It’s a hairbrained scheme and most dangerous.” (link)

The involvement of rabbits in this idiom seems to be non-obvious to a great many speakers; “hairbrained” gets ca. 10k raw Google web hits to ca. 50k for “harebrained” (1 April 2005). The much more frequent “hair” is giving the rarer “hare” a serious race for its money. The semantics seems to involve hair as inconsequential, fluffy, silly.

See also other “hare”/”hair”-related entries.

James Cochrane, Between You and I, labels this a spelling error. Perhaps it is for some people.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/04/02 |

invisible » invincible

Chiefly in:   the invincible hand

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • According to Adam Smith, market has an ability to manage itself by the “invincible hand”. (link)
  • Even in a full-dress market economy like the United States, the “invincible hand” of market forces of demand and supply is not necessarily the “Hand of God”. (link)
  • We are essentially back to the age of Adam Smith who believed in the “invincible hand of the markets”. (link)
  • Would you agree with me that the purpose of regulation, therefore, is basically to stand in the place of what I believe was referred to as the invincible hand of the marketplace? (link)
  • During the past decade, the foreign exchange market has been the invincible hand guiding the purchase and sale of goods, services and raw materials in every corner of the globe. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

References to the or an “invincible hand” are common in the contexts of card games and religion. From there they appear to have spread into economics.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/04/01 |

bouillon » bullion

Chiefly in:   bullion cube

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Cook for about 10 minutes over a moderate flame, seasoning with the crumbled bullion cube. (link)
  • 1 vegetarian bullion cube, prepared according to package directions (typically, 1 cube is combined with 2 cups water) (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

As noted by Ken Lakritz, this is a common error. The search engines turn up hundreds of links to recipes.

It is not entirely clear whether we have a simple hesitation about the correct spelling of _bouillon_. But in this case, we might expect the form _boullion_, which is indeed just about as frequent as _bullion_. To bolster the eggcorn hypothesis we note that bouillon cubes come in an individual gold or silver wrapping at least in some parts of the world, and do slightly resemble miniature ingots.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/04/01 |

awkward » awkword

Variant(s):  awkwordness

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • even had jokes I would tell people while I was waiting for people to reboot to fill the awkword silence and keep the customer from getting frustrated. (link)
  • More awkword moments went by. We sat in silence while outside the barking and hooting of the java programmors echoed loudley, sounding like Feeding Time in the deepest vaults of the basement of the zoo where they keep all the deranged and defourmed animols who arent allowed outside for the generol public to see. (link)
  • Right now the source code is pretty awkword(will make it better when releasing :-) ). (link)
  • Looking at the life of this woman, we identify with her awkwordness and tragedies. (link)
  • As an anarchist, voting always has presented an awkword situation. (link)

Heidi Harley mentions _awkwordness_, with an unusual stress pattern, in a post about language humor in the Simpsons.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris W. (admin), 2005/04/01 |

incorrigible » incourageable

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • A new voice boomed now, much like the old one, but with more anger. It was the voice of an infuriated parent, ready to dole out punishment to an incourageable child. (link)
  • you’ll also note that some of the greatest ‘defenders of the faith’ had no faith or were incourageable drunkards who played for conquest and booty… (link)
  • We drove in silence to my condo in Gold Coast where you would prove to be the most incourageable and thankless of all my progeny. (link)
  • I’ve given the POWER to the most corrupted, incourageable, untenable hunks of human viciousness I could find. (link)

Even though the word _encourageable_ (meaning “capable of or responding well to being encouraged”) probably exerts a pull on the spelling of _incorrigible_, I have marked the reshaping as _incourageable_ as a genuine eggcorn: The link between the _-corrig-_ component and _correct(ion)_ might indeed be rather obscure for many people. Moreover, except in the euphemism _correctional facility_, _correction_ isn’t employed very often to refer to discipline (or child rearing).

Sometimes, however, the conflation with _encourageable_ goes all the way, as in this entry from the Urban Dictionary:

> 1. Cretin
> An encourageable greenhorn. No matter how much you try, the person has no idea of what he is being instructed, nor does he care. The person is hopeless

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/04/01 |
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