Dictionary of Eggcorns: words mispelled as other words

Yes. And…

Sticklers may grumble, but Shakespeare wouldn’t have minded. He knew that language changes. He changed a lot of it himself.

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Um, wait…egghorn ? We have another new one, folks!

(Who wants to bet whether or not Rob did that on purpose? Would he actually tell us?)

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An “egghorn” is what you get when you shine a light through a “malaproprism”.

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I grew up thinking it was “duct tape,” but only learned relatively recently that it is (or at least was, originally) “duck tape.” Which makes sense, as the stuff is actually terrible to use for ducting work.

It’s a chicken-egg ouroboros - the recent “duck tape” brand is just going back to the original name. (Originally used for non-adhesive strips of “duck cloth,” but during WWII the name transferred to waterproof tape made with duck cloth.)

The internet as a whole I suppose has really caused the explosion. Previous to that, most printed material went through some sort of editing process. Now, for English at least, unless you’re a young, non-native speaker, it’s people who know the language less well than you do, so it’s rife with mistakes, eggcorns, nonsensical punctuation, etc. that gets picked up by others. (Though I do want a “small, thin feral hog to satisfied different clothes and occasions.” Clothes-hog: should be a thing.

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Indeed!

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One which everybody on the internet seems to do constantly: using “weary” when they mean “wary”.

Eggcorn, on the other hand, sounds like a made-up example someone invented just to have a convenient name for these. I’ve never seen anyone use it (though it’s not like acorns get discussed all that often, admittedly) and the words barely even sound similar.

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Ristantly delated to the “moonerspism”, herpaps?

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Getting into the weeds, lol, but… that should be “untwilled” (since it’s plain weave).

(I knew it, but decided to check the reference given in the Wikipedia article, to be sure of the writer(s?)’s intent. Found the book at The Internet Archive, but it was restricted. Signed up for an account and borrowed the book to verify. Yes, the source says “untwilled” :slight_smile: )

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Is that a depilation product for those hollow-back girls?

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This reminds me of a story from years ago when I was learning Dutch, though it is not really an eggcorn. I was in a café with my class and there was a photo of a squirrel with an acorn in its mouth. I pointed at the picture and asked, “What is that called?”

Native speaker: “Eekhoorn” (pronounced very similarly to, though not quite exactly like, “acorn”).

Me: “No, not the thing in the animal’s mouth, I want to know what the animal is called.”

Native speaker: “Eekhoorn IS the name of the animal. The thing its mouth is a [word I have long since forgotten since I rarely use Dutch anymore].”

I was so convinced they were pulling my leg that I had to look it up in a dictionary after I got home.

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We’re all prawns on the great chessboard

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I think @FGD135 recently posted the german joke about ordering a croissant but getting a squirrel instead.

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Yup. Disclaimer: doesn’t work in the South where say say Eichkatzerl.
On the other hand, if you can pronounce Eichkatzerlschwoaf flawlessly they will accept you as one of their own.

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My younger daughter (2.5 years old) says “Einhörnchen” for squirrel.

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:smile: :+1:

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An 80s punk band, whose name was inspired by the moderately more successful Dead Milkmen. The two paired up in 1993 for the Egg Topic Pregnancy tour but artistic differences sank the partnership before they’d gotten out of Manchester.
/s in case anyone thinks this needs to be taken with less than a grain assault.

Also, doesn’t “Cease and decease” seem like a beautifully polite way of telling someone to “f- off and die”?

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Huh, apparently I really didn’t get very far in Subnautica… have to go back to that one.

It did sound extremely plausible.

Is that another name for a carb hangover? (Or just a hangover?)

That’s it, I’m going to start using it now.

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Methinks this should be Oachkatzerlschwoaf if you go full Austrian or Bavarian.

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I was in elementary school in the 1980s, when the Tiananmen Square protest and Dr. Kevorkian were both mentioned a lot in the news, so, not really paying too close of attention when I’d hear the word “euthanasia” mentioned I thought that they were saying “youth in Asia…”

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