GrammarBlog

Mocking Poor Grammar
Since 2007

A noun that is formed from a verb and which describes an action. In English it ends in -ing, eg 'the baking of bread' and 'Smoking damages your health'.

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1. I’d never heard of an eggcorn until I read about it on your tweets. However, in a funny bit of timing, a friend of mine recently kept telling me about eggcorn pancakes. It took me forever to figure out what he was talking about until I realized he was saying “acorn” with a very Northern US accent. I teased him relentlessly about this, and then we both got a kick out of your tweets and the Wikipedia article they prompted us to find.

   Comment by Jeremy — 27th January, 2009 @ 2:28 pm

2. I love that there is a name for these! I have always been a fan. One of my favorites was someone calling the commuter rail the “computer rail.” I can kind of see where they would have made that mistake….

   Comment by arianna — 27th January, 2009 @ 2:31 pm

3. Slightly off topic, but not really…

   For some reason, even though we (i.e. Canadians) think we say ‘about’, the rest of the world hears ‘a boot’.

   Of course, my favourite eggcorn is always the should/would/could ‘of’.

   Comment by sars — 27th January, 2009 @ 2:59 pm

4. “Play it by year” instead of “Play it by ear.” My wife said that one.

   Comment by Chris — 27th January, 2009 @ 4:26 pm

5. sars, are you referring to saying “should of” instead of “Should Have”.

   Also, when someone with an extreme American drawl accuses me of saying “Aboot” I usually say “YOU have a lot of nerve making fun of MY accent”

   Comment by Kev — 27th January, 2009 @ 9:52 pm

6. Not sure if this qualifies as an eggcorn. Maybe it’s a mondegreen.

   My parents, (Canadian) were on a cruise some years ago, where they were assigned to eat all their meals with the same group from somewhere in the southeastern US. Their table mates seemed extremely concerned with the filthy habits of the Yawls Geese, a breed of goose my parents had never heard of. They brought it up on multiple occasions over the course of three or four days. My parents kept asking each other, “Why are these people so hung up on these geese? And why do they look at us like that whenever they bring it up? And what the heck are Yawls Geese anyway?”

   Finally on about the fourth day, my dad said to them, “I’ve never even heard of a Yawls goose.”
   My parent’s amusement at realizing they had encountered the possessive form of the American “Y’all” was only amplified by the realization that these people had spent the last four days holding them personally responsible for the poo left all over the South East by migrating Canada Geese.

   I guess that’s not really an eggcorn, is it?

   The story makes me cringe because it reminds me of a former roommate who often said “Your guyses”, which I think is a variation of Y’all’s.

   Comment by Kev — 28th January, 2009 @ 1:31 am

7. I’ve been told by Americans, English people, and Aussies that we say ‘aboot’. Strangely, the Scots don’t seem to notice. Hmm… Funny that.

   I’m also reminded of another story for no reason at all… My aunt married a man from New York City. Never mind that he’s lived in Canada for 35 years, he once went off on a rant about how Canadians don’t audibly distinguish between the man’s name ‘Don’ and the woman’s name ‘Dawn’. He somehow made Dawn have two syllables.

   Comment by sars — 28th January, 2009 @ 2:38 am

8. I remember GrammarBlog’s own Dan telling me about someone he once worked with using the phrase “power for the cause” when he meant “par for the course”.

   Comment by Tom — 28th January, 2009 @ 6:39 am

9. My friend Jim (27, Mancunian) returned considerably refreshed from interviewing a Japanese DJ last night, and informed us that said DJ told him he wants to start producing something more ‘advent garden’.

   It transpired he meant ‘avant garde’. I think the powers that be should rebadge the genre thusly.

   Comment by Cragg — 28th January, 2009 @ 9:22 am

10. Kev – The goose story, while amusing, doesn’t really constitute an eggcorn. That’s just a misunderstanding. I think an eggcorn should be instantly recognisable as a variation of the intended phrase and ideally, on some level, make sense. I thought Mondegreens were restricted to song or poem lyrics but perhaps I am mistaken. It has been known to happen.

    Sars – I can’t think of a good reason not to allow “Should of” so I’m going to use the flimsy reason that it’s not charming or funny, just annoying!

    Comment by Gez — 28th January, 2009 @ 11:09 am

11. [...] To entertain you, I will direct you towards The Grammar Blog. I can’t quite remember where I came across this blog, but I’m always up for a bit of syntactical geekery (hey, it’s part of the job description, ‘kay?), and at the moment there’s a post featuring eggcorns.1 [...]

    Pingback by and this isn’t even high-density living » scribbling damselfly » deborahkalin.com — 30th January, 2009 @ 8:06 am

12. An acquaintance taught a writing course, in which a student used that well-known idiom “It’s a doggie dog world.”

    Comment by TrivTriv — 4th February, 2009 @ 12:05 am

13. “It’s a Doggie Dogg World”

    Fo’ sheezy my nizzle!

    Comment by Anton — 5th February, 2009 @ 5:45 pm

14. My sister teaches beginning writing and her students plague her to death with these. They’re always awful cliches that have no place in academic writing anyway. My favorite was “right from the gecko.”

    Comment by ambero — 24th February, 2009 @ 11:06 pm

15. Frankly, I doubt anybody will ever top “nominal egg”.

    Comment by Nathan Myers — 25th February, 2009 @ 12:03 am

16. I don’t really understand ‘nominal egg’. What is the intended meaning?

    These are great everyone. We got some good submissions via twitter and email too; I need to get a round up post written.

    Comment by Gez — 26th February, 2009 @ 11:38 am

17. “Here, let me google that for you…”

    “A nominal egg” is a Nor’eastern pronunciation of “an arm and a leg”, i.e. more money than I would rather have spent.

    Comment by Nathan Myers — 26th February, 2009 @ 7:53 pm

18. I like this one: Maypole syrup )

    Comment by Tina — 10th March, 2009 @ 10:49 am

19. Also, courtesy of a Swedish friend of mine, ‘pig cheese’ instead of ‘chick peas’. That one led to some serious confusion!

    Comment by Tina — 10th March, 2009 @ 10:56 am

20. Never heard of an eggcorn before!

    Comment by Jewellery Recruitmenr — 13th March, 2009 @ 9:32 pm

21. “Pig cheese” is not an eggcorn, it’s a Spoonerism.

    Comment by Nathan Myers — 17th March, 2009 @ 7:58 pm

22. Mishead words are mondegreens, it’s only an eggcorn when there’s a logical reasoning to the mishearing.

    ‘Hare’s breath’ is an eggcorn because it’s something that’s a short amount of time, so fits into sentences where you might say ‘a second behind’ a logical misunderstanding of ‘a hair’s breadth’ meaning a short distance as in ‘lost by a hair’s breadth’.

    ‘Eggcorn’ is an eggcorn because it’s a logical mishearing of ‘acorn’ – an egg is something small from which something larger grows/hatches – ‘from little eggcorns do mighty oak trees grow’.

    ‘Communal garden’ is unlikely to be an eggcorn as there’s no logic to it.

    Also in order to qualify (in the Language Log’s Eggcorn Database), the eggcorn also has to be in common usage.

    See The Eggcorn Database for more information and a large database of examples, with citations – http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/

    Comment by Nat — 27th March, 2009 @ 7:41 pm

23. I think ‘communal garden’ works. But thanks for the sensible information, Professor Yaffle.

    Comment by Gez — 31st March, 2009 @ 5:50 pm

24. Please excuse my ignorance. Until reading this page, I had not been aware of eggcorns, mondegreens or malapropisms (or, more to the point, that these phenomena had names). I am now infatuated, as I think these are the things that make language so much fun. I have some questions though. Is an eggcorn also a malapropism, albeit one that has some sort of logic involved? Is it absolutely necessary for a malapropism to be nonsensical? And finally, would it be fair to say that an eggcorn is a mondegreen, but that the reverse doesn’t necessarily hold true? Thankyou so much for making this little word nerd a very happy fellow.

    Comment by Kane — 11th May, 2009 @ 8:16 am

25. Malapropisms tend to be nonsensical and also aren’t necessarily close homophones.

    Mondegreens occur when poem or song lyrics are misheard.

    You know what? I think this deserves a dedicated post.

    I heard a great eggcorn over the weekend but can’t recall it. I knew I should have written it down.

    Comment by Gez — 11th May, 2009 @ 11:13 am

26. @ Nat

    “‘Hare’s breath’ is an eggcorn because it’s something that’s a short amount of time… ”

    Sorry? “a short AMOUNT OF time”?

    In any case, surely “hair’s breadth” is a measure of distance — that is, the thickness of a hair — rather than an interval of time?

    Sorry to split hairs!

    Comment by Ant — 18th June, 2009 @ 8:17 am

27. But a “hare’s breath” only lasts a short amount of time, maybe you’ve never seen the way a hare (the animal) breathes after it has been running around for a while – they often look like they are about to hyperventilate. The two phrases don’t have the same logic but they do both have *a* logic so it is an eggcorn.

    Sometimes things that don’t look like eggcorns (because they don’t seem to have any logic) can be because we will come up with some fairly big leaps to make a misheard phrase logical (it’s nicer if the world makes a little bit of sense). It’s worth remembering that most idimoatic phrases make no sense, not really (Kettle of fish anyone? What about this whole different kettle fish?)

    “Hair’s breadth”/”hare’s breadth” is more interesting to me than some other eggcorns because there is, let’s say, more overlap in the potential conversational usages of the two phrases than there is with other cases of eggcorns. For example if someone told you they lived “a hair’s breadth” away from the bar you were standing in you might think they meant that it would take only a short time for them to get home (if you believed the phrase was “a hare’s breath”). Most likely it wouldn’t matter, neither meaning would actually be entirely true anyway and in human terms both would eqaute to pretty much the same thing. We really are quite beautiful, complex creatures

    Comment by Jeff — 17th July, 2009 @ 12:58 am

28. Hey, this post was a while ago so not sure if you’re still collecting examples, but I enjoyed this on Radio 5 Live tonight; it’s a Newcastle United fan talking during a debate show they were hosting about the state of the club:

    “… I’m probably going to get lamb-blasted for saying this…”

    ps found this blog whlst googling for a good definition of ‘eggcorn’ to link to

    Comment by yo_daniel — 5th August, 2009 @ 9:28 pm

29. Phone in to Radio London about great guitarists:

    “…and I think Eric Clapton’s playing is icon classic”.

    I like this because it’s a great phrase and it also reminds us of how misused ‘iconoclastic’ is.

    Nick in London.

    Comment by nick — 18th August, 2009 @ 12:26 pm

30. I also like “balling my eyes out.”

    Comment by Bran — 22nd July, 2010 @ 1:57 am

31. When reading a job application form yesterday, the applicant was giving an example of their anti-discriminatory practice:
    “…instead of pigeon-holding them”

    Thought pigeon holding sounded quite a nice way to be held…?
    MichyHell
    Punxville, UK

    Comment by MichyHell — 30th June, 2011 @ 11:36 am

32. My boss just said “Thank goodness I’ve got a memory like a hawk.” Ha ha.

    Comment by Tom — 11th May, 2012 @ 6:24 am

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