The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

This seems to be most common in Indian or Malaysian English. I suppose this is because it is a commonly used word in those regions, but nobody really is told the origin and meaning of the name — what do fools and caps have to do with paper, after all? ‘Fullscape’ might appear to make more sense… it is a ‘full’ sheet, a full view, as it were. Added to the fact that the common pronounciation is more like ‘fullscap’ rather than ‘foolscap’ (though for some reason, ‘fullscap’ is not as common a misspelling in Asia. But, googling, it appears it does occur in British, Australian and African sources. Anyone up for an analysis on the geography-relative misspelling difference?)

The examples above were supplied to me in e-mail by Laura Whitton on 12 March 2005. The eggcorn was already noted on this site by astarte93, in a comment on the “eggcorn” entry itself.

Certainly a reanalysis, in several senses, though it’s hard to see “sort of speak” as an improvement on “so to speak”. It could have arisen in a mishearing and then spread.

(And note the verb “loosing” in the “not because I really believed it myself” cite. See the entry on “loose”.)

I found this in the comments to a blog (I didn’t note which one). I collect what I call ‘bloggos’ - unusual word usages I find that seem to pop up often in blogs. The complete sentence was:

I don’t have the numbers, but by enlarge, I believe older guys date younger girls.

All I can remember is that the writer seemed very literate, aside from this one slip. A Google search finds over 50,000 hits for the expression, including, for example:

Endoscopic drainage, by enlarge, fails to achieve these principles

which comes from an academic paper, here:

http://www.joplink.net/prev/200311/01.html

A cross-language eggcorn, first brought to my attention by David Fenton in soc.motss (on 28 August 2004), who recalled the “pre-fix menu” he encountered at a D.C. restaurant a few years ago. Well, the cost is fixed ahead of time, right? Slightly Frenchier is “pre-fixe”, as in the example above. I reported these sightings in Postcards from Eggcornea on Language Log.

Here in Palo Alto, the University South News (written by Elaine Meyer) noted on 11 February 2005:

About Language. The advertisement for a prefix dinner is back! But it has improved: it is now a pre-fixe dinner. Optimists that we are, we celebrate progress, no matter how modest.

—–

Rationalizing the modifier as a participle (or, possibly, “restoring” the deleted past participle suffix) then gives us “prefixed”. Ed Keer reported wryly to ADS-L on 17 December 2004: “On my lunch walk today I passed a restaurant advertising “prefixed menu.” I don’t know what they have against bare roots.”

[Jeanette Winterson writes:

In New York I passed a Vietnamese restaurant with a board offering a Pre Fix Menu. I went inside to ask about this, and was told what you’d expect about the food prices, so I asked why they called it a Pre Fix. “Yeah,” said the guy, “we fix the Specials of the Day every morning, but before we fix those, we fix the set menu of the day, so that’s why it’s called a Pre Fix.” So now you know.

B.Z.]

From Jim Landau on ADS-L, 12 December 2004: “A favorite of mine is “Grumman’s Chinese Theater”, which presumably hosted
the premiete of the movie “Top Gun”.”

Not an eggcorn, strictly speaking, but still a reshaping in which an unfamiliar item is replaced by a more familiar one (for someone who knows more about the aerospace industry than about Hollywood).