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Chris -- 2018-04-11

#1 2017-12-06 13:41:20

lennoxec
Member
Registered: 2017-12-06
Posts: 1

"Belgian whistles"

Found this tweet: https://twitter.com/BryceElder/status/9 … 0546871296

Heard a guy talking about Belgian whistles.
“A basic website costs 10k, or 25k upwards if you want all the Belgian whistles,” he said.
Belgian whistles.

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#2 2017-12-06 15:41:59

Dixon Wragg
Eggcornista
From: Cotati, California
Registered: 2008-07-04
Posts: 1375

Re: "Belgian whistles"

Nice find! Never saw that one before.

Welcome to the Eggcorn Forum, lennoxec!

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#3 2017-12-06 18:07:13

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2714
Website

Re: "Belgian whistles"

Reported yesterday by Mark Liberman on the Language Log site, quoting somebody else. (Bryce Elder? I’m too ill-twitterate to figure out for sure.) It would be a very classy eggcorn, though given the nasty Urban Dictionary-type meanings, one has to wonder if it was an eggplant. (Lots of people think the grosser a phrase they can hide under a pun the cleverer they are.)
.
Several other good ones were discussed in the comments, a number of which are already here. “Paystub artist” < “paste-up artist” (reported by Dick Margulis, with evidence it was somewhat standard) I think was not. Also the Shakespearean play A Fellow seemed a noteworthy Aunty Lehmann, if it’s really standard for anybody.
.
I enjoyed the following interchange:

David L said,
December 6, 2017 @ 10:04 am

I wonder how many of these are generation by speech-to-text conversion…
.
Mark Meckes said,
December 6, 2017 @ 10:50 am

I think they’re all generated by speech-to-text conversion. In most cases, that conversion was done by human beings.
.
Ouch, but true.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2017-12-23 16:13:42)


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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#4 2017-12-23 15:17:02

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

Re: "Belgian whistles"

A pun. Perhaps even an eggplant, given that you can buy a T-shirt sporting the joke. Actual web evidence of people using this term as an eggcorn is mighty thin.


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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