Possibly the Funniest Misspelling

I won't quote the exact way it was used, but on a social media post today I saw a person spell the word dementia as dimensia.

It almost qualifies as an eggcorn, as if a person with dementia is in another dimension. That's a pleasant way to think of it, compared to the connotation of demented.

I never thought about the etymology of demented or dementia before now, but of course de- is from Latin, "away from" and -ment comes from mens, "mind."

A Few Flips of the Tongue, 2024

It's close to a year since I've done a Flips of the Tongue post (here's the last one). I don't accumulate them quite as fast as I used to.

Wrong on the concept

This could be the death nail: I saw this in a Twitter thread. It's is a particularly interesting misuse, since it crosses "death knell" with "dead as a door nail." Does that make it an eggcorn?

Off the cusp: I saw this in an email from a friend. 

A tone death interview: Also in a Twitter comment, this time about an NPR story. It's the type of misuse that you almost think could be insultingly on purpose, but then... nah.

Original stuart of this land: Stuart the Steward was always an original kind of guy.

Eco-chamber: Jordan Klepper was being interviewed somewhere and he said "eco-chamber," when clearly he meant was "echo chamber." He was talking about a bunch of Trump supporters, so the idea of them being trapped in an eco-chamber was particularly amusing.

Mixed up animals

Following a dead horse to water: Daughter Number 3.1 sent me this mixed metaphor after she heard it on an episode of Survivor.

The golden goose that puts all its eggs in a single basket: I heard a person say this during a nonprofit organization's meeting, while talking about a fundraising activity.

I’ve got no dog in this show: I said this unthinkingly, quickly realized it was an incorrect version of the saying, and then thought, Hey, this is the nonviolent version of it. Why not?

Spelling is a lost art

Kakameme instead of cockamamie. I can't remember where I saw that, but I know it took me a while to figure out what word it was supposed to be.

Bell whether instead of bellwether (in a Twitter response).

A yellowed sheath of paper: from a published Pioneer Press story. Was it supposed to be sheet or sheaf? Either way, I found myself imagining someone pulling a sword from a paper sheath. Would that give you a paper cut?

Flips of the Tongue, 2019

I don't have a lot of time today, since I'm busy with one of my many mysterious volunteer commitments, so I thought I would share the short list of eggcorns, mixed metaphors and assorted funny usages I've accumulated since my last post on that topic. I swear I literally (not figuratively) either heard or read each of these with my own ears or eyes.

The cart before the egg—I think I heard this on NPR or MPR. What a great mixed metaphor. Maybe the chicken is riding in the cart while it crosses the road? Or while its eggs are hatching? Maybe the horse is sitting on the eggs to get them to hatch. Just think of the possibilities.

Silver bullet Hail Mary—When your bullets aren't good enough to kill the vampires, you send your passes through the Virgin Mary, or... something.

By enlarge—A classic eggcorn. And because of this, I now know that the proper phrase, by and large, is "originally a sailing term meaning 'alternately close-hauled and not close-hauled.' A ship that is sailing 'close-hauled' is sailing as directly into the wind as possible (typically within about 45 degrees of the wind)" (according to Merriam-Webster).

Chastise pronounced shastize—I'm not sure if I heard this on television or radio; the fact that I don't have a source note makes me think I heard it on the radio while in the car. This pronunciation error is understandable, in my opinion, since many of us learn our big words from reading, and chastise does derive from French... so why did we somehow begin to pronounce the ch- like chair instead of shower anyway?

Piece of mind—It was clear in the context (since lost in my bad note-taking) that the speaker or writer meant peace of mind, rather than piece of my mind. I think this is a pretty common error, and I'm not sure it's interesting enough to qualify as an eggcorn.

Step on their parade—Oh ha ha ha. I get such a great visual from this!

That doesn't hold much muster—I heard this just a few days ago from another NPR or MPR speaker, somehow combining cutting the mustard, passing muster, and holding... something? Water? Pretty great!

An Eggcorn for White Supremacy

I can't figure out how to embed this BBC video, so you'll just have to watch it on Twitter.

In it, a woman named Theresa Hong is interviewed inside the former offices of the Trump campaign's Project Alamo. She says she was Donald Trump's primary ghost writer for Facebook during the campaign (though he wrote his own tweets). When asked how she got his voice right, she says she relied on lots of "Believe me"s, not to mention some "very"s and "actually"s.

The social media crew was co-officed with a group called Cambridge Analytica, which crunched a ton of demographic and psychographic data to figure out how to spend $85 million on social media, primarily Facebook. The ads ranged from Trumpish rants to soft pitches aimed at moms with young children. Many were meant to depress turnout among Trump opponents by portraying Hillary Clinton as not worth voting for (for instance, reminding black voters of HRC's super-predator statement from the 1990s).

All of this is eyebrow-raising enough, but the thing I want to call attention to is an eggcorn that rolls easily off of Ms. Hong's tongue. The BBC interviewer starts it by asking her, “What were Facebook and Google and YouTube people actually doing here? Why were they here?” She responds,

They were helping us, you know, they were basically our hands-on partners as far as being able to utilize the platform as effectively as possible. When you're pumping in millions and millions of dollars to these social platforms, you're going to get white club treatment. So they would send people, you know representatives, to Project Alamo to ensure all our needs were being met.

Wow, get that? She thinks the phrase "white glove treatment" is "white club treatment." And in her case, that's a perfect example of an eggcorn, which is not just any slip of the tongue. Rather,

The crucial element is that the new form makes sense: for anyone except lexicographers or other people trained in etymology, more sense than the original form in many cases (emphasis added).

__

Other stories written about Project Alamo while it was in operation or shortly after the election. I don't remember noticing any of these stories:

• This Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Trump Campaign Is Terrifying. They admitted they don't want black people to vote. From October 2016 in Esquire.
• Inside the Trump bunker, with days to go on Bloomberg News in October 2016.
• Donald Trump’s campaign is powering a massive negative-campaigning voter suppression effort on Salon in October 2016.
• How the Trump Campaign Built an Identity Database and Used Facebook Ads to Win the Election on Medium, mid-November.
• Project Alamo’s data-driven marketing campaign won Donald Trump the Presidency on Semantiko, mid-February 2017.

Flips of the Tongue, 2017

It's been a while since I posted one of these. I keep a list in my phone for times when I hear or read something that qualifies as flip of the tongue, whether an eggcorn, malapropism, or plain old mixed metaphor. Seems like most of these come from Facebook.

I am sure I hear the plaintiff cry of an animal... (Written by a high school friend on Facebook.)

Feathering their own beds. (A Facebook friend, discussing millionaires in Congress.)

It's mind-bottling how inept the drivers are in Mount Vernon, Ohio. (From Twitter.)

You have your ear to the pulse. (Said by one of Daughter Number Three-Point-One's friends.)

She was skiddish. (From Twitter.)

That does not bold well. (From a comment thread on MPR's Newscut blog.)

College costs are out of the roof. (Comment from a high school student on NPR.)

Convenient store. (From a Facebook comment.)

Bubba tea. (Instead of bubble tea, possibly the result of autocorrect.)

Trump looks like a duffos. (From a Facebook comment; what a doofus mistake.)

A behind the seems look at... (From a friend's Facebook post, but then it turned out he had written it on purpose.)

They are bunkering down for the winter. (Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, talking about the Lakota encampment at the Dakota Access pipeline.)

Drill down to the brass tacks. (Not sure where I saw or heard this.)

We are decedents of a man who settled in western Wisconsin... (From a friend's Facebook post.)

Most religions have tenants. (Not sure where I saw this, but it was in writing. It may be a new favorite error.)

"Hone in" Was Bad Enough

The misuse of "hone" for "home" in the phrase "home in" has been going on for a long time, at least since the early 1990s, according to Bryan Garner (who gives it a Stage 3 rating, meaning it has become commonplace but is still avoided in careful usage). "Hone" was the subject of one of my earliest posts.

But recently I saw a new variant that's even worse:


This story from the Washington Post was reprinted in both of my local newspapers (in fact, it made it into the Star Tribune twice — once in this shortened form on December 31 and again at full length on January 3). That means it got past the few remaining copy editors at least four times (counting the original from the WaPo).

I have a feeling that "zone in" is a rhyming eggcorn for "hone in." (An eggcorn is a homophonic substitution that makes sense to the listener or reader.)

Here's where I think the sub came from and why it makes a twisted kind of sense: You know how cop dramas and science fiction generally like to show a technician zooming into a screen image to see details of a crime or other surveillance footage? The investigator standing over the tech's shoulder says, "Can you show more detail there?" and the tech drags the cursor cross-hairs over a small zone of the picture, magically enlarging it with lots more resolution to reveal "the truth" or at least a significant clue.

The tech picked a zone and zoomed in ("zone" and "zoom" are also almost homophones). So now we have home —> hone —> zone (zoom).

While "zone in" may make sense in a way, it's still obvious the copy editors have zoned out rather than in.

Percy Jackson and the Grammo of Stupidity

Lately, I've been reading my way through the Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan. I don't see what all the fuss is about, but then, I'm not the intended age target.

Structurally, they're clearly derivative of the Harry Potter series (outsider boy with powers he didn't know about meets extra smart girl at a school/camp and ends up trying to keep an evil lord from coming back into power).  I hear they get better as they go along, so I'm giving them a chance to convince me.

But meanwhile, I had to comment on one textual error that I found:


I don't remember seeing any other typos or grammos along the way, but this one is a doozy. "I'd just assume keep it" -- ? Did you mean "I'd just as soon keep it," copy editors?

This doesn't even qualify as an eggcorn, because it doesn't make any sense.

Flips of the Tongue, 2014

Once again, I've accumulated enough flips of the tongue to make a post. I have heard or read all of these: No secondhand reports here. Many are mixed metaphors, while others are malapropisms or eggcorns.

The ship had sailed down that road. Proclaimed by Uni Blake, a pro-fracking representative on the Melissa Harris Perry show.

We're skating on thin ice if we continue on autopilot. As heard on NPR last fall.

It's not UPC to discuss mental institutions. From a comment on minnpost.com. This one might be an autocorrect problem, but funny nonetheless.

A nurse I met, who was wearing a uniform top decorated with friendly Paul Frank monkeys, referred to them as Anne Frank monkeys.

Someone was talking about the golden age of comedy, probably on NPR. The speaker then mentioned Laurel and Hardy, followed by Elvis and Costello.

I recently heard someone say Kamikaze group when Posse Comitatus group was what was intended. (That one is a bit of a Freudian slip.)

And then there was the person who referred to a soldier going AOL (instead of AWOL). I wonder if any CDs were sent out to find him?

At some point during the Senate filibuster last fall, President Obama said the members of the Senate were grinding the gears of government to a halt.

You've got to bring up the white elephants in the room. Spoken by Minneapolis Community and Technical College student Cody Mehlin in a story about Prof Shannon Gibney. That darned colorful elephant and its cousin the heavy gorilla are two of the most mixed-up phrases I've heard, coming up twice before as flips of the tongue and once in a stand-alone post.

This may just be griping and grammar sniping, but I recently had a client who thinks ergo (therefore) is the same thing as e.g. (exempli gratia, which means for example). It took me a while to figure out what s/he was talking about because it just didn't make any sense. (This person also thinks usages of "which" should be proceeded by a semicolon instead of a comma. And that dominate is an adjective synonymous with dominant — the dominate person, for instance. But I should stop grumbling about this.)

Repeat the basic quarry. Clearly, the query must have turned to stone. (From a comment thread.)

Wouldn't it be embarrassing if you didn't know the difference between the slang term Johnson (meaning penis) and John Hancock (meaning signature, as in, "We just need your John Hancock here"). I can't remember what the context was when I encountered this one, but I think it was a person who referred to a penis as a John Hancock, rather than the other way around. Thank goodness. Imagine if someone were to point at a form that needs to be signed and said, "We just need your Johnson here."


More on the pits:

My last post about flips of the tongue listed the misuse of "pit in my stomach." Later, I heard someone else use that expression and checked into how common the usage is. While reading about it, I found this:

At least 'pit in my stomach' and 'hone in on' make sense, and are therefore genuine eggcorns. A few days ago I stumbled on a comment on a blog which said that something 'warmed the cuckolds of my heart'. A Google search confirmed that it wasn't unique. A malapropism, not an eggcorn, of course (and therefore off-topic?) but I couldn't resist sharing it. (commenter Steven F.)

That quote comes from a discussion thread about the writing of Thomas Friedman, which also included this bit of verbal brilliance, masked as a flip of the tongue:

Friedman marches to the tune of a different kettle of fish. (commenter Dan Lufkin)

Past Flips of the Tongue:

December 2007
January 2008
March 2008
June 2008
December 2008
December 2010 
August 2013

Drawing the Gecko, Badly

Spring has finally arrived, so it's office-cleaning time. As I shuffled through random papers, casting armloads into the recycling, I found this doodle I made during a meeting:


I'm not sure if someone in the meeting had used the phrase, or if s/he had said it correctly and it just reminded me of this eggcorn.

Here's an earlier post on eggcorns and the misuse of the gecko.

A New Name for a Stick

What do you call this little item you would put into a computer's USB port to transfer files from one computer to another?


It's one of those solid state flash memory thingamabobs that has no moving parts, but can hold between 200 megabytes and many gigabytes of data. They started out costing hundreds of dollars about 10 years ago, and now are so cheap it's pretty easy to get one for free.

Some names I've heard used:

• Jump drive
• Thumb drive
• USB stick
• Data stick
• Flash drive
• Memory stick

But yesterday I saw a new name in a client's email:

• Junk stick

Which I can only imagine is an eggcorn combining a mishearing of jump with stick.

Given the kinds of files that wind up remaining on mine, I think I will immediately switch to this new term.

Debate Number Three

I couldn't blog during the Tuesday night debate; had to timeshift it. Maybe it's just as well, though, because the content felt mostly like a retread of the first debate.

Just a few observations:

• McCain said "my friends" 17 times, by my count.
• Obama said McCain thinks he (Obama) is "green behind the ears." See my earlier post on this eggcorn.
• I thought McCain showed a severe lack of self-awareness when he (twice) said he would provide a cool hand at the tiller. (Actually, the first time he said "cool," the second time he said "steady.") This from the man who was described this way by a Republican colleague, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, in the Boston Globe: "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."
• Not a single "maverick" from McCain. I guess that ship has sailed.

Hearty, Creeping Hair Bells

Last year, I saw a Home Depot ad that touted their selection of hearty perennials. While the dictionary defines hearty as "exhibiting good health" and even "vigorous," I doubt that's really what Home Depot meant... no, they were intending to say the plants were hardy, which means "capable of living outdoors over winter without artificial protection."

I must say, that example of an eggcorn did little to assure me that Home Depot is the place to find knowledgeable plant sellers or good plants.

Today I was perusing the Minneapolis neighborhood paper The Bridge and ran across an article about The Wild Ones, a group of native plant enthusiasts. The description of one gardener's yard contained a plant name groaner:

...she started ripping out the backyard buckthorn, honeysuckle and creeping hair bells with an eye towards an overhaul.

Hair bells, huh? Are those like the hair balls my cats cough up?

I think the writer meant harebells... and actually, I haven't heard the plant they're referring to called creeping harebells, but rather creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides) which I have written about in another post on this blog. The U.S. native harebells (Campanula rotundifolia) are relatives of the creeping thug the gardener was trying to eliminate. So that's where the name conflation comes from.

By the way, when I googled "creeping harebells" I got just two hits, so I would guess that name is not in common usage; an alternate spelling, "creeping hare bells," returned no hits. ("Creeping hair bells" earned me a Google prompt: Did I really mean to search creeping hairballs?)

Of course, I know plant names and nuances like this are beyond arcane. But hey, a gardener's got to draw the line somewhere.

Otherwise, it was a nice issue of The Bridge.

My Favorite Eggcorns

As I wrote in my last Flip of the Tongue post, I discovered the Eggcorn database the other day. An eggcorn is similar to a malapropism, and also to the misuse of homonyms, but with the following differences:

Not every homophone substitution is an eggcorn. The crucial element is that the new form makes sense: for anyone except lexicographers or other people trained in etymology, more sense than the original form in many cases... Thus, thumbs down for definately and they’re / there house (not eggcorns, just phonetic misspellings: the non-standard versions don’t make any more sense than, or reinterpret the meaning of the standard versions), but thumbs up for for all intensive purposes. (quoted from the About page of the Eggcorn database)

Here are my favorite eggcorns listed in the database.

Dashboard stomach for "washboard stomach" -- I imagine that this would be the way to describe Homer Simpson's physique.

Pus jewel for "pustule" -- This seems like the very definition of an eggcorn. It actually makes more sense than the original.

Cut to the cheese for "cut to the chase" -- I'm always a fan of any example that combines two phrases, especially when one of them has a scatalogical meaning.

Conjunctive heart failure for "congestive heart failure" -- I imagine this is what all of us English majors will die from one day.

From the gecko for "from the get-go" -- With a sponsorship deal from Geico, the possibilities for this one are almost endless.

Chewy nugget for "chewy nougat" -- Yum! Can't you just taste that delicious chicken nugget.

Like a bowl in a china shop for "like a bull in a china shop" -- I love how the mundanity of this mental image completely contradicts the original.

And probably my all-time favorite:

Cognitive dissidence for "cognitive dissonance." I wish I'd heard this one before I started this blog -- I probably would have used it for the title.

Flip of the Tongue, Part 4

Here are a few more recent flips to go with parts 1, 2 and 3. Since these were all actually seen in print, I guess they also qualify for Honey -- Get Me Rewrite as well.

Evasive species -- I'm not kidding. I read this in a school newsletter recently (the school shall remain nameless). I guess it could be the opposite of an invasive species... you know, a new term for endangered species.... Those threatened animals can be hard to find while their numbers are dwindling.

Pasta with roasted baby vegetables -- Okay, so there's no overt mis-thinking in this recipe headline, which I saw in a grocery store coupon book. More like not seeing the forest for the shrubs. Or something like that.

Short-sided -- As in, "Your advice seems short-sided." This was printed in an advice column in the Pioneer Press recently. Sheesh. (I actually didn't notice this one, since I don't usually read the "Ex-Etiquette" column. Thanks for passing it along, Nancy!) At least they got the hyphen right.

A final note: in Googling "evasive species" to see what turned up, I discovered there is a term for this type of usage, which also fits the "short-sided" example: It's called an "eggcorn" (as in, a misconception of the word acorn). There's an entire website with forums and everything dedicated to discussing new eggcorns.

A bunch of like-minded people... I guess I should feel like I've found my home on the Web. But right now I mostly feel like I've arrived late for the party.