Eggcorns and other nutty expressions

The Eggcorn Database

Eggcorn: words and phrases used wrong, but in a way that kind of makes sense.

• All tolled
• Slack your thirst
• jar-dropping

A great one from my past was an old boss who more than once said, “Oh, that’s six to one, half a dozen of the other.”  Probably not technically eggcorn, because try as I might, I couldn’t wring any logic out of it.

History of eggcorns? Here’s a little edited quote from the website:

In September 2003, Mark Liberman reported an incorrect yet particularly suggestive creation: someone had written “egg corn” instead of “acorn”. It turned out that there was no established label for this type of non-standard reshaping. Erroneous as it may be, the substitution involved more than just ignorance: an acorn is more or less shaped like an egg; and it is a seed, just like grains of corn. So if you don’t know how acorn is spelled, egg corn actually makes sense.

The criteria of how to identify eggcorns have also been clarified. Not every homophone substitution is an eggcorn. The crucial element is that the new form makes sense: … more sense than the original form in many cases…. Thus, thumbs down for definately and they’re / there house … but thumbs up for for all intensive purposes.