A couple of weeks ago Mark Liberman was kind enough to announce my new blogging venture on OUPblog, the official blog of Oxford University Press. Wearing my new hat as editor for American dictionaries at OUP, I hold forth on matters lexicographical in a weekly column with the catchy title "From A To Zimmer." Some columns will be of particular interest to Language Log readers, and this week certainly fits the bill, as it's all about one of our favorite topics: those semantically motivated reshapings of words and phrases we call eggcorns.
If you're new to the field of eggcornology, I hope the column serves as a useful primer. Now that I'm at OUP, it's exciting to be able to poke through the 1.8 billion-word (and counting) Oxford English Corpus to track the mainstreaming of popular eggcorns. Last year, before I started the Oxford job, I tried to discern the utility of the OEC for eggcorn-tracking in a Language Log post based on press reports about the Corpus, but now I have the inside scoop!
[A word of warning: Chris Waigl's indispensable Eggcorn Database, which I link to in the OUPblog post, is currently down. I hope I haven't flooded it with new traffic.]
[Update, 3 pm EDT: The Eggcorn Database is back up and running.]
Posted by Benjamin Zimmer at July 12, 2007 09:07 AM