Spotted in the wild:
Wilson Gray supplied the example above (from Harry’s Blues Lyrics OnLine, Home Page) to ADS-L on 31 December 2004. Larry Horn noted, “this one is endemic, as is its mirror-image (“past” for “passed”).” And I added, “indeed. and it’s hard to tell whether these are eggcornic or just spelling errors. the semantics is close, and they were originally the same word. see MWDEU on ‘passed, past’.”
See also passed » past.
Spotted in the wild:
First pointed out to me by Brian Joseph on 8 January 2005. On 11 January there were ca. 19,500 Google web hits.
Possibly a blend of “far be it from X” and “it’s not for X”, both of which take infinitival complements. This analysis is suggested by the fact that the first idiom seems to be most comfortable in the first-person singular (??”Far be it from Kim/you/anyone to complain!”), while the second is not so constrained (”It’s not for Kim/you/anyone to complain!”), and “far be it for” is like the second:
(For what it’s worth, on 16 March 2005 I got ca. 601 Google web hits for “far be it for him”. Much less that for “far be it for me”, but not close to zero.)
[Entry updated following Tom Rossen’s comment. I have added a persistent link (free registration required) to the archived NYT editorial, which starts with the quoted sentence. CW, Aug 9, 2005]
Spotted in the wild:
Rich Baldwin, in e-mail on 21 January 2005, supplies the following Google results:
“sow(ing) * wild oats”: ~15,200 ghits (5,760 ghits)
“sew(ing) * wild oats”: ~850 ghits (465 ghits)
“sow(ing) * wild oates”: ~50 ghits (77 ghits)
“soak(ing) * wild oats”: 3 ghits (2 ghits)
The middle two are probably just spelling errors.
…Is this the birth of a new eggcorn?
—–
[I responded] hard to say. it does replace a pretty rare word with a much more common one, but i don’t see any real improvement in sense. maybe the rare > common change is sufficient, though.
—–
[And he replied] I agree with you about the sense: I don’t think “soak” holds a better meaning than “sow”. Note that the word “sow” referred to in the phrase is no longer in everyday use. I would bet that everyone who uses “soak his wild oats” thinks only of “needle and thread” upon hearing “sow”. The original word is gone except in the phrase in question, while there is a commonly used homonym attracting attention elsewhere. Contrast, for example, what happened to “broadcast”; the word is still used, but changed to denote television signals, not seeds.
Therefore “sow his wild oats” sounds confusing, while “soak…” less so. We are left with an eggcorn that is not a more comfortable phrase, just a less uncomfortable one.
I brought this to your attention because the ghit number was so small. (Just checked again. Score is now 4 / 2. Go team!) I thought it interesting to see the documented start of an eggcorn.
Spotted in the wild:
From a posting to ADS-L by Jim Landau on 23 January 2005:
While in the Bronx Help Center on Friday, I brought up the topic of a storm. [And got the response above.]
MWCD10 has “skeletal” as meaning “…resembling a skeleton” so presumably the staff was stranded for days with no food and when rescued were down to skin and bones.
—–
Possibly just a (natural) extension of the meaning of “skeletal” to cover the same metaphorical territory as “skeleton” in “skeleton staff”. Or possibly a Fay-Cutler malapropism.
Spotted in the wild:
Presumably with stress on the second syllable, so a result of intervocalic flapping neutralizing /t/ and /d/, represented in spelling by a “d”. Still, the “pedal” element might be a move towards something having to do with feet.
On 28 November 2004 I got 720 (raw, unexamined) Google web hits for “centripedal”, as against 6,260 for “centrifical” (q.v.) in place of “centrifugal”.