The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

In her Boston Globe column _The Word_ of October 9, 2005, Jan Freeman reflects on what Arnold Zwicky has called the Recency Illusion: the idea that if you’ve noticed some non-standard or uncommon bit of language only recently, you believe that it in fact originated recently (see Arnold Zwicky’s Language Log articles here and here). As an example, she quotes a particular understanding of _shuffle off this mortal coil_, which is in effect a hidden eggcorn:

> The bait was a quotation, in a New York Times book review, from Greg Critser’s “Generation Rx,” saying that pharmaceuticals now promise “everything from guarding us against our excesses of drink, food and tobacco … to extending our very time on this mortal coil.”
>
> “On this mortal coil?” But when Hamlet speculates about having “shuffled off this mortal coil,” in what must be Shakespeare’s most-quoted speech, we all know he’s not talking about a Savion Glover move-don’t we? “Shuffle off” means “get rid of, dispose of,” says the OED, and “mortal coil” means “the bustle or turmoil of this mortal life.”
>
> So was Critser’s misunderstanding a new one? Of course not. To judge by Google hits, hundreds of people think “shuffling off this mortal coil” involves going somewhere on foot. Even in edited sources, people have been getting it wrong for nearly 20 years.

The eggcorn relies on an interpretation of _shuffle_ as “move or walk in a sliding dragging manner without lifting the feet” (Where did he shuffle? Off this mortal coil.) instead of the verb-plus-particle _shuffle off_ “get rid of, dispose of” (What did he shuffle off? This mortal coil.)

For hidden eggcorns, which do not involve a change in spelling, we often need indirect evidence of the writers’ understanding of the expressions they use. This can come in the form of examples that use _on and off this mortal coil_, the double preposition _off of_, or synonyms of _shuffle_, such as in the following examples:

* I suppose if I had to stagger off of this mortal coil, “beer potomania” wouldn’t be such a bad way to go (compared to most of the other diseases in this book). (Amazon book review)
* Tell me something - does he get to sleep with Elizabeth Shue before he lurches off this mortal coil? (Barry Glendenning, Guardian Unlimited Football, June 20, 2004 )
* There are numerous surveys that suggest that women who live alone spend their time skipping gaily through the tulips and sipping at crystal streams of joie de vivre until they eventually slip off this mortal coil with a gentle sigh of satisfaction between snow-white linen sheets, while men forget how to wash, walk and talk and are eventually killed by MRSA from their own underpants and expire in a sticky heap of jazz mags and burger buns. (Lucy Mangan, Guardian Unlimited, March 2, 2005)

The origin of _short shrift_ is explained by here, here, and here.

This sometimes appears as a pun, but the above examples (and many others on the Web) are evidently unironic.

This one needs a bit of investigating. The term “chaise lounge” is used, especially in the USA, to refer both to chaise longues and to what others might call a sun lounger. images.google.com/images?… Clearly, chaise longues have existed for centuries, and three things are unclear. First, when and where the misspelling originated. Second, whether the mispronunciation began earlier, later, or at the same time. Third, when and where the sun lounger began to be named “chaise lounge”.

[CW, 2005/09/02: several examples added.]

[AZ, 2005/09/02: this one is listed in many sources on usage and errors, including Brians and MWDEU (which has a pretty detailed entry on the expression).]

The word ‘foul’ (offensive, noxious, unfair) could often apply to that which is ‘fell’ (fierce, ruthless, terrible, deadly). The above example relating to the forced eviction of settlers in Gaza is such an example. This coincidence of meaning and the words’ similarity in sound combined the low awareness of the word ‘fell’ creates the ideal conditions for an eggcorn.

The Concise Oxford defines ‘at one fell swoop’ as ‘in a single (deadly) action’. Popular use of the phrase and the eggcorn often draws on the ’single action’ part of the meaning only. For example, deleting all items at once from your Microsoft Office clipboard is neither offensive nor deadly. Though it can be done in one single action this swoop would be neither foul nor fell. Hence either meaning is equally [in]appropriate. The same applies to the Between The Lines example.

The Guardian Unlimited book reviewer in another example above may have quite knowingly used the eggcorn because the word foul is so appropriate in the context of a kiss and tell biography.

Media Monitors’ A Case for Ethics talks about ‘a dirty deed’ thus underlining the new meaning of the eggcorn.

In a somewhat self-referencing example, the Christian Times writer used written words improperly and thus partially destroyed some of his own good work.

See also fell»fowl.

[CW, 2005/08/29: marked as “questionable”. The substitution certainly involves a semantic reinterpretation, but phonetically, the distance between _fell_ and _foul_ is rather a stretch.]