January 28, 2005
Defecated to eggcorn fans everywhere
The numbers are too small to award this one eggcorn status. And it's also not very eggcorny since it's not clear that the mistakes are a matter of reanalysis. But what it lacks in frequency and linguistic sophistication, this double malapropism makes up for in appeal to that small but important segment of the Language Log audience that shares my puerile, not to say scatalogical, sense of humor.
Many of the Google hits are for intentional defacate/dedicate and defacate/defect replacements, but genuine unintentional productions do seem to occur:
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Nowadays
tourists visiting Hoa Lu
could only see two temples some 500m apart from each other, standing in
the ground of the ancient palaces: One was defecated to King Dinh Tien
Hoang and the other to King Le Dai Hanh.
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Aerobatic
ship defecated to a great
supplier of scale sailplanes Endless Mountain Models
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But
Saddam reminds me of the little boy who cried wolf too often. Recall
that once Mustafa (his son-in-law who was head of the secret police) defecated to Jordan and reported
on the Nuclear Bomb program that Saddam had up to then successfully
hidden from the UN. Hmm, what we didn't know...
[Frank Delaney] remembers the night his father came home "hugely amused" because a local man had asked him why he thought Burgess and Maclean had defecated to the Russians.
[Frank Delaney] remembers the night his father came home "hugely amused" because a local man had asked him why he thought Burgess and Maclean had defecated to the Russians.
[Update: gee, I'm getting confused by our own terminology now. First time I posted this I wrote snowclone when I meant eggcorn. Snowcorn? Presumably, a historically incorrect reanalysis of a standard idiom-like template. Or vice versa.]
Posted by David Beaver at January 28, 2005 12:36 PM