The third citation was provided to me on 7 May 2005 by John McChesney-Young and caused me to search Google for other occurrences of “bi-law”. I’ve labeled it as “questionable” because I’m not clear about how people who use this spelling think twoness enters into the meaning of the expression. Maybe they think there’s a first, main, set of laws, and then there’s a second set, the bi-laws. Or maybe it’s just a misspelling.
Spotted in the wild:
Analyzed or reported by:
Ann Burlingham observed on soc.motss on 6 May 2005 that “vocal chords” outnumbers “vocal cords” by a good bit on Google, even on a music dictionary site.
Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage notes, “The chord spelling can still be found in American sources in combination with spinal and more frequently with vocal, where the unrelated musical chord may affect people’s spelling.” It’s the association with musical chords that makes this possibly an eggcorn. But MWDEU notes that “the chord spelling with adjectives like vocal and spinal is historically justified and considered acceptable by a number of British authorities”. However, since “it is widely understood to be a misspelling in American usage”, they recommend the cord spelling.
[Update: 18 October 2007, Ben Zimmer] More about vocal c(h)ords on OUPblog here and here.
[Update: 7 November 2007, Arnold Zwicky] And now Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words (#542, 2 June 2007) reports starter chord: “This past weekend,” notes Michael Shannon, “I participated in a course for the use and care of chainsaws. Now, chainsaws are often accused of making awful noises, so I found it highly amusing that the printed material we were given constantly referred to pulling on ‘the starter chord’. Unfortunately, we weren’t told what key it was in.”
[Update: 6 June 2009, Arnold Zwicky] More from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words (#641, 30 May 2009): Jenny O’Brien tells us the St Cloud Times of Minnesota reported on Friday 22 May: “A fire started by an old electrical chord caused smoke damage late Thursday to a mobile home in southeast St Cloud.”
Spotted in the wild:
Pointed out to me by Lia Carpeneti on 6 May 2005, who reported a very long discussion with friends about the acceptability (and form) of this expression. Could be a blend of “in order to” and “to be able to” (or, as David Romano suggests in a comment, a telescoping of “in order to be able to”), maybe with some contribution of “enable” to the mix. In any case, “able” makes more sense than “order”, so it’s in the eggcorn sphere.
Google provides thousands of examples. I swear I’d never heard (or seen) it before.
Originally entered by xerby, who commented:
Just a phrase, “spitting image”, I’d heard for about forty years. And then one day someone on the radio said “spit and image” which immediately made more sense to me. In the first we could easily visualize a boy picking up his father’s bad habits(spitting…like mothers don’t spit), or if you’ve ever seen a boy walking with his dad you’d see the same gait(as well as image). In the second instance, “spit” infers a more visceral, biological, connection.
And, of course, the visual “image” stays as part of the phrase.
Most major dictionaries report that _spitting image_ is an alteration of _spit and image_. In an article in American Speech, however, Larry Horn argues that the expression was originally _spitten image_ (_spitten_ being a now-archaic dialectal form of the past participle of _spit_), and that both _spit and image_ and _spitting image_ are later reinterpretations. (The _American Speech_ link requires a subscription to Project Muse — see also Michael Quinion’s summary at World Wide Words).
Horn’s article also discusses various eggcornish reanalyses of _in_/_and_/_-in’_/_-en_, some of which appear elsewhere in the database (e.g., off the beat and path, once and a while).
Spotted in the wild:
Analyzed or reported by:
The verb “augur” ‘foretell’ occurs in modern English with any frequency only in the idiom “augur well/badly (for)”, so it’s ripe for respelling with the verb “auger”, related to the noun denoting a boring tool (though “auger” is itself a rather specialized word — just not as specialized as “augur”). The references treat this as a simple spelling error, and it might well be; the question is whether some people who use it think that boring is somehow involved in the meaning, perhaps though current states of affairs boring, metaphorically, into the future.
Certainly, the “auger” spelling is common: on 10 April 2005, I got ca. 12,400 raw Google web hits for “augers well for”, a respectable number in comparison to ca. 63,500 for “augurs well for”.
“Augurs” is reshaped more drastically in “all goes well (for)”, q.v.