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butt » bud

Chiefly in:   the bud of someone's jokes

Classification: English – /t/-flapping

Spotted in the wild:

  • Adding insult to injury, the FOX network, which is taking a beating this fall in the ratings, has become the bud of a joke in the form of a fake press release circulating through portions of the TV industry. (link)
  • You know how people say, “You’re the bud of every joke”?? For you it’s “You’re the bud of every lie”, almost every rumor we know is spoken from your lips. (link)
  • It’s funny how some people are. How some people like to have all attention on them, no matter what the price, or who ends up being the bud of the joke. (link)
  • Not one to be the bud of a joke, Drew replied “If I am such a dog, why did you marry me?” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

David Romano, whose post was spotted and referred to by Mark Liberman, found himself in the throws of this eggcorn and subsequently went to the bottom of the matter:

> I was talking with Kirk Boydston about this, and he thinks the eggcorn is “bud of all jokes” since intervocalic /t/ becomes a flap. He also suggested that “butt” as in “objective end” of all jokes. Apparently, I should have checked dictionary.com, since when I looked up “butt”, the first definition of the third sense of the word is: One that serves as an object of ridicule or contempt: I was the butt of their jokes.

Indeed, AHD4 notes two verbal and three nominal senses of _butt_, with all in all three different etymologies. The _butt_ of _the butt of someone’s joke(s)_ goes back to French _but_, meaning goal, target.

See also bud»butt as in _nip in the butt_.

| Comments Off link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/04/02 |

slither » sliver

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “A leech-like thing slivered across his cheek, and Chekov screamed. He tried to raise his hands to wipe it away, but felt his hands restrained.” (link)
  • “Finally, his tongue lightly slivered across her folds over her thong. She let out a silent moan while pushing her hips up to his face.” (link)

See the _sliver_ >> _slither_ entry for background. The two examples above were among the 37 hits that a Google web search (on 2 April 2005) provided for “slivered across”. I admire the poetry of “slivered across” — and, for that matter, of “a slither of”.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/04/02 |

sliver » slither

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “for example, a crowded beach, with a slither of sky in the background. … billowing clouds on a blue sky, with a slither of beach in the foreground.” (link)
  • “Another favorite is a slither of “Serrano” or “Jabuga” ham from Andulucia accompanied with a slice of bread and a beer or Dry Sherry” (link)

James Cochrane, Between You and I, just says that “sliver” is “often confused with” “slither”, without examples or any indication of the direction of the substitution. Eggcorning is usually strongly in one direction, with the more familiar or frequent item replacing the less familiar/frequent one, rather than the reverse. In this case, I wouldn’t have thought that “slither” and “sliver” (which are phonologically very close) differed much in frequency or familiarity. And it turns out that there are replacements in both directions. Googling on 2 April 2005 turned up ca. 978 raw web hits on “a slither of”, two of them provided above.

See also “slither” >> “sliver”.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/04/02 |

aisle » isle

Chiefly in:   walk down the isle

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • I walked the isles looking for snacks, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about him. (link)
  • He was simply to shy to walk down the isle to the preacher at the Baptist church. (link)
| 2 comments | link | entered by carthik, 2005/04/02 |

sphere » spear

Chiefly in:   spear of influence

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • [Israel] functions today as a “virtual offshore U.S. military base,” in the words of Chomsky, and is the prime American foothold in the region, the tip of the spear of American influence in the Middle East. (link)
  • So this is hezb Allah, the Party of God, the spear of Iranian influence in the Levant and chief local enforcer of Syria’s occupation of Lebanon. (link)
  • At this point, I was not even really concerned with the Platts. They were little more than a nuisance… Something I could deal with. Until they demonstrated just how far their spear of influence punctured the heart of ST. (link)
  • Over the past eighteen months, Russia and China have been joining together to form their own spear of influence on their side of the globe. (link)
  • There is one area we all have to be conscious of, and perhaps through our own spear of influence we may be able to assist with, is that we are seeing more and more PTSD cases coming than we ever have before. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

This is one of the eggcorns that show how word choice can slide under the pressure of what could be called the metaphoric potential of a word. For _sphere_ and _spear_, these are quite different: a sphere is a container, homogeneous, round, can grow or shrink; a spear is long and pointed, a weapon.

The substitution _sphere»spear_ can occur as a spell checking artifact, too. But none the less it looks like a genuine eggcorn for at least some writers.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/04/02 |
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