flawless » floorless

Classification: English – /r/-dropping

Spotted in the wild:

  • Every track on albums such as “Controversy,” “1999,” “Around The World In A Day,” “Parade,” etc was not floorless. (alt.music.prince, Sep. 11, 1997)
  • I have a friend who is a floorless dj and shares my love for breakbeat. (uk.music.breakbeat, Sep. 15, 1999)
  • Your logic is floorless. (alt.recovery.na, Jan. 21, 2000)
  • I don’t think anyone expected the floorless play achieved by Spurs. (alt.fan.scarecrow, Jan. 24, 2002)
  • They were good, for me some were a bit obvious in terms of the imagery but the execution was floorless and I love anything that you can’t quite work out how it’s made so perfectly. (Stuart Semple blog post, Sep. 14, 2005)
  • Dave Haley’s drumming was floorless and fast as fuck!! (Beb's Space blog post, Mar. 30, 2006)
  • Her [black belt] grading went really really well. Her patterns were floorless, the self developed was sweet, terminology was spot on and she broke all her boards!! (Captain Ordinary blog post, Apr. 7, 2006)
  • I have found from exprience the Swedes along with other Northern Europeans and the Dutch are excellent English speakers in most cases with a floorless accent that I have often mistaken them for native British speakers. (Antimoon English forum post, Apr. 16, 2006)

Analyzed or reported by:

When Eggcorn Forum contributor Kirk pointed out the use of floorless for flawless in the Antimoon forum (see last citation above), the original poster claimed that “floorless is simply another way of spelling flawless here” (the poster hails from northern New Zealand). That claim is hard to justify, though floorless is an obvious pronunciation spelling for non-rhotic speakers who homonymize floor and flaw.

The semantic rationalization is a bit difficult to discern. Perhaps “floor” is taken as a metaphor for a limit, so something that is “floorless” is limitless in its excellence.

| link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2006/05/22 |

Commentaries

  1. 1

    Commentary by commentar , 2006/08/10 at 2:37 pm

    In the case of the Captain Ordinary blog post, I think it really is only a simple spelling/typing mistake. Ealier in the same paragraph he writes “Kath seemed pretty nervis”.

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