August 23, 2007
Eugene Volokh re-discovers eggcorns
And invites his readers to contribute.
Here's a thought: someone might add an optional "eggcorn alert" to AbiWord and OpenOffice and similar tools.
Each hit could be provided with a link to relevant entry in the Eggcorn Database, so that errant authors could evaluate the evidence themselves.
In other eggcornological news, Jan Freeman recently contributed a compelling analysis of this comic strip's use of the term bi-products (" Mr. Boffo lays an eggcorn", Boston Globe, 8/15/2007):
If you think about it, "biproducts" might have been a more logical name than "eggcorns" for these little poems of misapprehension. But "eggcorn" is better, I think: in metonymy, evocativeness trumps logic.
Posted by Mark Liberman at August 23, 2007 07:03 AM