August 09, 2006

A jewel of an eggcorn

In honor of Mark Peters' article on eggcorns in the Chronicle of Higher Education, William Salmon shared a "particularly juicy" (albeit gross) eggcorn on the American Dialect Society mailing list: pus jewel for pustule. It's now been enshrined in the Eggcorn Database, complete with examples from the Web.

Just think: if this had been noted on Language Log a few years ago, we might all be referring to such reshapings as "pus jewels" instead of "eggcorns"...

Posted by Benjamin Zimmer at August 9, 2006 10:09 AM