Spotted in the wild:
Wilson Gray supplied the example above (from Harry’s Blues Lyrics OnLine, Home Page) to ADS-L on 31 December 2004. Larry Horn noted, “this one is endemic, as is its mirror-image (“past” for “passed”).” And I added, “indeed. and it’s hard to tell whether these are eggcornic or just spelling errors. the semantics is close, and they were originally the same word. see MWDEU on ‘passed, past’.”
See also passed » past.
Spotted in the wild:
From a posting to ADS-L by Jim Landau on 23 January 2005:
While in the Bronx Help Center on Friday, I brought up the topic of a storm. [And got the response above.]
MWCD10 has “skeletal” as meaning “…resembling a skeleton” so presumably the staff was stranded for days with no food and when rescued were down to skin and bones.
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Possibly just a (natural) extension of the meaning of “skeletal” to cover the same metaphorical territory as “skeleton” in “skeleton staff”. Or possibly a Fay-Cutler malapropism.
Spotted in the wild:
Presumably with stress on the second syllable, so a result of intervocalic flapping neutralizing /t/ and /d/, represented in spelling by a “d”. Still, the “pedal” element might be a move towards something having to do with feet.
On 28 November 2004 I got 720 (raw, unexamined) Google web hits for “centripedal”, as against 6,260 for “centrifical” (q.v.) in place of “centrifugal”.
Spotted in the wild:
From Michael Quinion in e-mail, 28 November 2004: A question came up in the World Wide Words newsletter this weekend about the fictitious word “centrifical”. Would I be right to consider this an example of an “eggcorn”?
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Maybe yes, maybe no. Looks like a reshaping of “centrifugal” so that it has a morphological analysis that makes more sense, or at least looks and sounds more familiar: centrif-ic-al. That would be a (subtle) eggcorning in derivational morphology.
See also “centripedal” (for “centripetal”).
Not in MWDEU or Brians’s list, but Quinion noted in e-mail on 29 November:
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It is very common. In my reply to the questioner I said:
Google turned up 3000 examples. A newspaper search found hundreds of others, the oldest being from the Manitoba Daily Free Press of 11 October 1879. An obituary in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in February 2003 credited its subject with a book entitled Power Your Golf Swing With Centrifical Force, which would be a trick worth watching. Air-conditioning engineers seem particularly fond of it - I found many references to devices called centrifical chillers.