Spotted in the wild:
The first, recent (usenet) example was my first sighting of this error. The second (usenet) example is the earliest I’ve found, dated 1996. It’s quite rare, and hardly seen outside forums.
Spotted in the wild:
I originally thought this was just a typo often committed by writers of personal ads and followers of alternative spiritual paths, but it’s use is apparently a lot more widespread than that - I found it on government sites, debate clubs, travel guides, etc. There is an actual mining term “open mine” which gives the mis-uses a plausible origin, but while “open mine” is not rare, the phrase “open mined” does not appear to be a common form of the phrase in the context of mining.
[update] Thanks for feedback from David Romano, who discovered several hundred occurrences of the phrases “running through my mine”, “going through my mine” and “on my mined”. He confirmed that a large number of these are “mind” related. A large % of these usages are either in transcriptions of song lyrics or in the context of urban slang so the spelling could be intentional. Perhaps we can attribute the origins of this back to Mark Twain, who in his short story “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” (1892) has one of his characters say “dey’s somefin on my mine”.
[added by Arnold Zwicky, 22 July 2007] Frank McQuarry writes with an occurrence of “of like mine”: Where else will you see this picture? This was done on July 14th and today being the 22nd and I have yet to have seen this image any place else. Of course I will pass it on but to whom . . . To folks of like mine. So here we are again preaching to the choir. (link)
Spotted in the wild:
Analyzed or reported by:
Richard Fontana admits:
> I remember thinking (in third grade) that the Wind Chill Factor
> was the Winchell Factor.
Still on alt.usage.english, Maria Conlon analyzes:
> By the way, we also have a Winchell Factor, but we don’t pronounce it
quite that way. Anyway, I think the Factor is a creation of TV stations
that want to make even the weather more sensational a story than it is.
This eggcorn seems to stem from a pun, but some occurrences may be genuine.
Spotted in the wild:
I am fairly certain that “Works like a charm” is the original, but interestingly enough, a Google search of both phrases occurring in the same resource returns a shocking number of results:
Google:”works like a champ” “works like a charm”
Over 1,780 results!
[Entered by Neil and edited by Ben Zimmer. Marked “questionable” because it should probably be classified as an idiom blend, combining _works like a charm_ with _(do something) like a champ_.]