The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

I’ve marked this as “questionable” because it’s often hard to distinguish references to chewy nuggets of things from references to chewy nougat (literally, as in the first two examples, or metaphorically, as in the third). The word “nugget” is, of course, much more frequent and less specialized than “nougat”, so a reshaping would be natural.

Only two examples from a Google web search, both given above — these against ca. 117 examples of spellings with the correct “p” from Yiddish (ca. 74 of them for “bupkis”).

A reshaping as “don’t know buttkiss” would fit into the collection of negative idioms “don’t know (doodly) squat”, “don’t know shit”, and the like. But such a small number of examples isn’t a lot to go on, so I’ve marked this one as “questionable”.

Suggested to me by Roger Shuy on 18 May 2005, who even supplied a photograph (from an acquaintance) of a sandhill crane, with the caption “What in the Sand Hill is going on here?”

A reshaping of the utterly opaque “Sam Hill” expressions is entirely natural. Still, the numbers from a Google web search are small:
“what in the Sand Hill”: ca. 91
“what in Sand Hill”: 4
“what the Sand Hill”: 2
(I’ve removed references to Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road, home to venture capitalists and the Stanford Linear Accelerator.)

For comparison:
“what in the Sam Hill”: ca.832
“what in Sam Hill”: ca. 685
“what the Sam Hill”: ca. 642
(though a fair number of these cites are mentions of the expressions, not uses of them).

As for the “Sam Hill” originals, Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words concludes: “The expression has been known since the late 1830s. Despite the story [about a Connecticut politician named Sam Hill], it seems to be no more than a personalised euphemism for “hell”.” (www.worldwidewords.org/qa…). The euphemism source is supported by the odd syntax of “Sam Hill”, occurring (like “hell”) with “what in the”, “what in”, and “what the”.

Marked questionable, since I’m not sure what the semantic justification here would be. _Brawl_ in the sense of ‘noisy quarrel’ or ‘loud roaring noise’ does suggest an unpleasant sound, but that’s a bit different from the prolonged speech patterns associated with _drawl_. Is this possibly a blend of _brogue_ and _drawl_?

See also drawl » draw.

In comparison to the enormously frequent “make due” (q.v.), “make dew” is rare, and might just be a misspelling. It might even be a misspelling of the eggcorn “make due”!

(Rueful thanks to Ron Butters, who jocularly suggested this one on reading Larry Horn and me on “make due” on ADS-L, 7 May 2005.)