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A friend of mine had always called a chest of drawers "Chester Drawers" and - not sure this is an eggcorn but - a friend of my husband's believed as a child that there was a household deity called the Time Being because her parents left temporary offerings to it, as they would say, "We can leave that there for the time being."
You just converted me to belief in the Time Being. Every time I hear or use that phrase from now on I’ll be thinking of appeasing some wrathful temporal deity.
I use a sponsor block but it skipped to the list and asking how many did you get. A good way to force one to go back and watch the ad, quite inventive, it wouldn't surprise me if it was done on purpose 😁
When I was at school, my English teacher told me not to worry about spelling or grammar because in the future there will always be autocorrect, and for that I am internally grapefruit.
Doggy Dog World is the one I said wrong my whole life, and I found out like 2 years ago it was Dog EAT Dog World. It blew my mine because it makes infinitely more sense to me
My favorite eggcorn is "Duck Tape" which is a rather remarkable DOUBLE eggcorn. Most people think duck tape is the incorrect form of duct tape and that the name of the product refers to its application to duct work. But the problem is that that "duct tape" isn't actually made for ventilation. If you research the history of the tape, you would learn that it was originally named for the cloth like substrate known as "duck" that gives it strength. So it was originally called "duck tape," but over time, it became known as duct tape because it seems like it's designed for ducts (even though it isn't). Ironically "duct tape" became so ubiquitous that the brand name "Duck Tape" was presumed to be a play on words and is now a registered trademark in the US, which should not be possible considering the proper original name for the product was always "duck tape".
I used to use duct tape all the time for duct work and got very frustrated when I found out that all of my duct tape was failing on the heat of the duct. Some of the duct work is buried in the walls and I can't replace it now !!
@@sharonshookup The fact that duck tape is ubiquitously referred to as "duct tape" and that duck tape is now trademarked is one of the greatest crimes ever committed against the english language, second only to Merriam-Webster literally using the words "not literally" in their definition of "literally", which I can't even think about without shaking with rage.
The "moo point" would be a muglare (not sure on spelling) wouldn't it, as Joey was commonly trying to sound educated like his friends who went to college, but he just didn't get it. But the moot point/mute point most definitely are eggcorns especially since, if I remember it correctly, moot means unspoken of where as mute means not spoken/speaking. Either way, they are unheard.
I just shared this video on Facebook with the caption "I like this sort of thing" and a friend of mine commented "It's just a phrase you're going through" Which I thought was rather good.
‚Just a phrase I‘m going through‘ is actually a very enjoyable book on linguistigs by Davis Crystsl I had almost forgotten. Thanks for the reminder. :-)
I think my favorite mash joke is a bit where Margret keeps answering questions for Frank to Henry and Henry says “Frank if you don’t shut up I’m going to have to punch her in the mouth”….. also basically any joke in a scene that has col. Flagg
There is a charming eggcorn in Afrikaans, Bromkatjies (pronounced bromkaikees). It is a mis-hearing of the English word bronchitis, the chest infection. But Bromkatjies literally translates thus: brom is like a grumbling hum, like what you do when you are unhappy with something, and katjies are kittens. So when you have bronchitis, you have grumbling kittens. Perfect.
I once emailed a boss to let them know I’d be sending them “the whole kitten caboodle” the next day. She let me know she couldn’t stop laughing at the thought of what a “kitten caboodle” would look like, but in future I may want to write “the whole kit and caboodle” instead. Not sure if that counts as an eggcorn, but whatever it is, it still makes me smile.
I now need to see a kitten kaboodle. Also I caught that typo immediately after I typed it, but I'll leave it in because that too is interesting on this topic.
Probably not a egg-corn, but in a small town in Ghana, I once read a sign on the front of a bar, 'You are almost welcome', instead of ALL MOST. Made me laugh!
Not really a foreign egg corn but I met someone from Colombia a couple of years ago. His English was pretty good but still learning. He told me that up until recently he thought our expression when leaving was “Happy Good day” instead of “have a good day” which, if you think about it makes sense because we have other sentiments that we express with “happy” e.g. Happy Birthday! Happy anniversary! Happy Mother’s Day! Etc. I thought it was pretty cute.
My daughter when she was four asked if she could put some food in the garden outside her bedroom window. When I asked why she said "To feed her Gardening Angel".
My friend and I are both around 70 years old and we have a running conversation about the egg corns that younger people produce. Our guess is that our vocabulary came from listening to parents and from reading a lot of older books that are no longer required reading in high school and college. Also younger people get more of their education from listening than from reading. Even if the phrase made no sense to you, if you read it over and over you will either just accept it or go look it up. Any phrase that you hear but don't read that uses now-archaic words is bound to be interpreted on the fly. Thanks for a fascinating presentation; I had no idea there was a specific name for this phenomenon.
Baby boomer here and our people watched Password and played Scrabble and loved reading in bed for fun. Love the English language. My mother would say: “see it say it and write it”to learn it.
I don't know about you, but it was always Buck Naked. Archaic Buck for male slave, sold naked, though most of us didn't know it came from a slave sale.
@@merrywriterb7811 But if nobody knew about the slave sale aspect of the term, wouldn’t buck naked make sense, as in a buck running in the forest naked. Buck naked. Why the term butt naked is used I’ve never heard explained. Like a cigarette butt? A butt joint in woodworking or welding? Buck naked makes sense, butt naked makes no sense.
@@ronsamborski6230 butt is a shortened informal form of buttocks. So if you have no clothes on, everyone can see your bare buttocks, or your bare ass, or your bare butt. You are butt naked.
I recently found out I've been using a german eggcorn for many, many years: the german word for the sound-producing lamella in the mouthpiece of woodwind instruments like the saxophone or clarinet is "Blättchen". It's the diminutive of the word "Blatt" or "Rohrblatt" which translates to the english "reed". Since the first time I heard someone mention it, I thought they said "Plättchen", which means "small sheet" and perfectly made sense to me, due to the shape of the reed: thin and flat (or german: "platt"). I thought I was correct for at least 20 years. Now I know I eggcorned myself.
Soft plosives indicate origin (or bringing up) in the South of Germany (or in Austria). Rund um Berlin oder Hannover passieren solche "Weichheiten" seltener.
My mother is German. I never learned the language, just individual words, like body parts and such, when I was a kid. Took me a long time to realize that I was not learning the actual words, but made-up versions ending in the diminutive -chen. Glad I never embarrassed myself by sharing them with other Germans, though I may have misinformed some classmates.
As a non-native English speaker, I was proud to notice that I have been using all of these correctly. But being a non-native speaker might have actually helped, because a lot of the English expressions I've learned have come through reading literature rather than growing up hearing them in everyday conversation.
Also a non-native speaker. I'm your typical grammar nazi, besserwisser, and no-fun-at-parties guy, according to the interwebs. So I really try my best not to point things out nowadays. And I believe I'm actually quite funny IRL, despite this flaw. But I think that my spelling OCD actually gets worse when I spot native English speakers making these "mistakes". Like, I try so hard to master this language, yet I can't trust the knowledge of the people speaking it, or something. But as you and @matthewbartsh9167 suggest, I think it all has to do with reading, i.e. literacy.
Meaning, I guess, I don't agree with Geoff Pullum (in the video). I _do_ think this has to do with illiteracy. That is, not reading enough books or novels or whatnot to sufficiently support your use of the language. Although at the same time, I definitely agree it has nothing to do with stupidity per se, and I can see the imaginative aspects of coming up with... personal interpretations.
In German, songs with lyrics that are often misheard are called "Agathe Bauer" songs. The story is that someone had called a radio station requesting the song about "Agathe Bauer". The song that the person actually wanted to hear was "The Power" by Snap, which has the lyrics "I've got the power" in it. Another example is "Anneliese Braun"; which is supposed to be "All the leaves are brown" from "California dreaming" by the Mamas and the Papas.
Reminds me of the Mexican Radio station one. The guy requests "Esos son Reebok o son Nike" (literally "are those Reebok or Nike). Turns out he was requesting. "This is the rhythm of the night" by the Eurythmics
I knew a fully grown adult at work who once asked me for a "vanilla folder" (instead of manila). I almost didn't catch it, but I asked him to clarify. Turns out his whole life up to that point he really thought they were vanilla folders because of their color. I asked him if he calls brown ones chocolate folders.
A former coworker of my mother's once described a movie she had recently seen as having too much "sexual in-the-window" instead of "sexual innuendo". My mom, sisters, and I still say it incorrectly for laughs👍
I love this. My mother did this type of thing so often. My sister and myself also have this trait of turning words inside out and backwards. To have my mom, sister and myself engaged in a conversation almost sounded like another language besides English. All three of us would not miss a beat and understand everything. Dad would have to leave the room. Over whelming to a word purist.
Gardener Snake vs Garter Snake has been one for me ever since I was a child. Had no idea what a garter was, and since the snakes were harmless and found near our garden, it made sense to call them gardener snakes.
Alternatively, guarder snake. Makes sense when you're a child and an adult's just introduced you to the concept of these snakes and their potential benefits to one's garden (eating pests).
A child I babysat long ago, asked me to polish her finger tails and toe tails. “Nails were in wood, but tails are on the end of things”…The child was three years old when she explained this brilliant eggcorn.
As I read this comment, I puzzled over it. I had subconsciously converted tails to nails before the explanation. So the explanation was completely out of context. A nonsequitor.
@mackdeen7021 if you read it properly , it makes sense. Fingernails are at the end of fingers and toenails are at the ends of toes, the tail ends if you will.
I always said, "buttload" of something. A friend corrected me, saying it was "boatload." So I looked it up. While boatload is correct, so is buttload. "In the United States, a butt is a unit of measurement that is equal to 126 gallons. It is also known as a pipe and is used to measure wine. A butt is technically two hogsheads, which is half a butt. Since a standard wine barrel holds around 60 gallons, a buttload of wine is roughly two barrels."
Yeah, buttload is definitely a different word meaning the same thing. I don’t think it comes from boatload but from just using butt as meaning a lot, like a butt-ton.
I have no idea whose butt they measured to set the standard. JK the word butt (then bytt) meant both the end of something and cask or barrel all the way back before the Norman Conquest.
In his autobiography, Anthony Burgess wrote an eggcorn on purpose: "Isle of Yew" instead of "I love you." He also wrote that as a child in church, he couldn't understand why everybody was talking about the cross-eyed bear (the cross I bear). He was thoughtful enough to die immediately after finishing his autobiography; so, it's completely up to date. Thanks for making these videos, Rob. They're fabulous.
When I was a waitress, I worked with a guy that was so confused because his customer asked for “camel milk tea”. I still crack up about it. She was asking for camomile tea! This brought up someone else thinking spiders where called “deadly long legs” instead of “daddy long legs.”
Although I never knew about "egg corns" at the time, a fine example comes to mind from the TV show Friends. Joey says something about a "moo point". Monica (I think) says, "Don't you mean a moot point?" And Joey replies, "No, a moo point. It's like a cow's opinion: it just doesn't matter."
My mother and I were joking around when she forgot someone's name and said she must have old timer's disease. I replied, "Thats OK, Mom, I have mentalpause." We both got a chuckle out of that. But actually, I don't think I've ever used any of those eggcorns. I've always read a lot, and when you see those common phrases in print, it's not as likely that you'll use them incorrectly.
I've been using old timer's disease intentionally for decades. The first person I heard it from was me. Indeed, I have never heard it anywhere else until this video. It's just such an appropriately sounding play on Alzheimer's. It just makes sense. By other favorite has been "bass ackwards" for "ass backwards". That being not an eggcorn, it is still demonstratabley funny in abuse of language.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I've most often learnt of these phrases in print, so I don't think I've miss heard any. But I've seen old timers disease before and I thought it was a charming way of saying Alzheimers disease. I honestly hope it become a thing. 😂
@@johnfitzgerald8879 I think 'bass ackwards' is categorised as a Spoonerism. Like when I use "shaking a tower" for 'taking a shower'. It even works in the past tense. I shook a tower.
When your brain works faster than language you can get bored and start messing up the way you say things on "porpoise". I read a lot too so much of my word learning comes from the printed page. It makes it so that I don't have egg corns but there are complicated or borrowed words from other languages that I always said wrong in my head until I heard it spoken out loud. "deus ex machina" would be an example of that. I assumed the "i" would be the French i sound. Nope.
The Hong Kong flu pandemic broke out in 1968. My brother had no knowledge of a place called Hong Kong but, with all the coughing going on, to his five year old mind it made perfect sense to think people were calling it the Honk-Honk flu. 😁
Just a day after watching this wonderful video, my wife received a little nugget in a work document. "... a last stitch effort." We think it fits! Thanks for the videos!
Have you forgotten about the Piglet's version of eggcorns? He always picked up "haycorns", and as a renowned specialist in the matter of acorns, he was surely right. Down with eggcorns, long live haycorns.
In Japanese before kids can read kanji and they just write everything in kana, it's often believed the word for watermelon (スイカ), suika is sui-ka (水果) which is water-fruit. But it's actually su-ika (西瓜), meaning western-melon.
In the old Partridge in a Pear tree carol, the Americans completely lost the meaning of ‘four colly birds’ by substituting the words ‘calling birds’. The original song used the word “colly” to mean sooty black (black birds), we get the words coal and colliery from the same root.
Thank you for explaining that. Since I was a kid I wondered what four "calling" birds meant. And the derivation of coal and collier are interesting too.
Most modern versions also have "Five golden rings" which most likely is a mishearing of another bird the "goldring" which actually fits the bird theme of those verses.
As a Catholic kid I used to hear the song- spoken communal prayer as "bless this sour food" instead of bless this our food". It made sense to me because the wine was awfully sour to a kid's taste and the wafers tasted mostly stale, so soured. I always wondered why we were choosing such an important prayer to complain about the food!
I could google it, but I think you enjoy telling me how the first two arent dirty. I honestly thought all three were in the same ballpark of dirtyness in some way. Dont explain balls deep, I got that one.
I knew a guy that was sick all the time, but it was psycho-systematic. He also dropped his jar of cherries once and smashed it to figurines but didn’t get mad. My hand’s off to him!
The favourite one that I ever heard was when my wife and I were guests at a wedding reception and another guest was telling us about her friend who had been injured and had to go to the emergency room at the hospital. Her injuries were so bad that she had to be transferred to the "drama ward" instead of trauma ward. The story continued for several minutes with numerous references to the "drama ward". The first time, we assumed it was a slip of the tongue caused by the open bar. By the fifth or sixth time, we realized that she assumed it was the "drama ward" because it was very dramatic. Over thirty years later, my wife and I still jokingly refer to it that way.
My mother considered herself the paragon of decorum and as such always spoke euphemistically when referring to topics she considered socially sensative. In our house "butt" was a four-letter word, and "buttocks" was little better, so she often used "derriere" to refer to one's "nether regions." When I was seven or eight years old, my piano teacher held a recital, and one of the older students played a tune called "Londonderry Air." I couldn't imagine why someone would play a tune about an English person's nether regions.
2:27 “Inference” is such a great word for what happened. It’s as creative and descriptive as it is charitable. Sensitive, intuitive but also very accurate. I guess that’s why he’s a linguist. 9:13 And “creative intelligence” 😂 Brilliant
I'd actually argue that "Just desserts" is a folk etymology instead of an eggcorn. Unless I'd missed something in the definition. I feel like "just desserts" has taken over as the standard here.
I remember reading in Reader's Digest many years ago about a woman who moved to the New York City/New Jersey area and began copying a phrase she heard locals saying about something expensive costing 'a nominal egg'. She said it for quite a while before it hit her one day. What they were saying was 'an arm and a leg' with the strong regional accent.
I grew up in that area and can confirm if I say "an arm and a leg" in my nana's accent (which is heavier than mine) it sounds just like "a nominal egg." What a great one!
Is it still an eggcorn if I use the wrong phrase deliberately? For example, I will refer to “old timer’s disease” deliberately when speaking with people who know that I know that the correct term is “Alzheimer’s disease” when I want to reinforce in-group bonding by using a shared witticism. (Yes, I realize that you may judge me a terrible person for making fun of other’s honest mistakes, and I won’t attempt to defend my behavior here.)
Sometimes there are deliberate and clever malapropisms, particularly in marketing:- I cannot name the camping store, it may no longer exists, but their winter sale ad is legendary:- “Now is the winter of our discount tents”
Reminds me of an old joke: A man is talking to his therapist. “Hey Doc, i keep having this recurring dream, I’m a wigwam I’m a tepee I’m a wigwam I’m a tepee I’m a wigwam I’m a tepee! Therapist say, “relax, you’re two tents.”
I can only think of a mondegreen that amused me. A girl talking to her grandfather asks if they can sing the ‘Pie Weighing’ song. Her grandfather asks her what she means, and the girl replies, “you know - somewhere over the rainbow, weigh a pie”. Another entertaining and educational video, Rob.
Being a Scot, I'm familiar with the Bonny Earl o' Moray ballad, and know the correct words, but I didn't know this was the source of mondegreen - a word which always puzzled me.
I was musically precocious, and enthusiastically sang hymns at church before I started school and learned to read. When the chorus for "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder" I was singing, "When the roll is called a pyonder" even though I had no idea what a pyonder was or what it had to do with heaven.
My ex husband always left when the cleaning lady arrived - her name was Lorraine - hence my son used to sing Rod Stewart's song "When Lorraine came, I thought you'd leave ....."
I had a chuckle when I overheard two people talking about their past woes and they both agreed that "it was all water under the fridge". I've used it a few times since to get a bit of a laugh. Where would we be without occasionally using our malapropisms for their comic "affect"
Yeah, you know, like when you drop an ice cube and can't be bothered picking it up so you just kick it under there where it melts into a puddle you neither notice nor care about.
Also an example of catachresis - misuse of grammar for comic effect. My favourite of those being Interplod from Only Fools and Horses. It will never be Interpol for me ever again.
As a kid in Germany, I misheard the word for petrol station (“Tankstelle” = “fill-up place”) as “Stankstelle” (= “stink place”), which, not having a concept for filling up a tank but smelling petrol vapours, made a lot more sense to me
On a very similar note, in India, a petrol station is most commonly called "Petrol bunk". It's weird because they don't call it that anywhere else. The closest term used elsewhere is "Petrol pump". It was probably an eggcorn, that later became folk etymology (its even in dictionaries now)
So two things.. firstly, at 11:24, getting to the bottom of "buck naked" is always a noble quest, and second, this was the first ever time I didn't skip a NordVPN segment.
My mother was a teacher so I learned about malapropisms and spoonerisms long before they mentioned things like them at school. She would use them deliberately. My favourite when she learned I can do many things as well with my left hand as my right - she told everyone I am amphibious!
That’s hilarious. My dad would do the same things when I was a kid. He’d say “obstacle delusion” instead of optical illusion. I’m pretty sure that one and others were on purpose. But he is dyslexic so Kimbles and Bits instead of Kibbles and Bits might be how he read it literally. Lol
My mom moved from France, she was familiar with the expression, "Penny for your thoughts," so when she heard, "I don't give a damn", she mistook it as, "I don't give a dime." It took her years to realize the mistake, but I must admit I like the "dime" version more.
@@cydkriletich6538Because people put their two cents in, but it’s only a penny for your thoughts, I’ve always wondered who is making that one cent of profit.
I have a friend who insists that to withhold strategic information is to not "tip your hat". I've explained that the phrase is "Don't tip your hand" - as in "don't let anyone see your cards" in Poker - but she is positive that tipping your hat means to give away a secret. Of course, if you're hiding a large bald spot beneath your hat, she's absolutely correct.
LOL< since I only heard it used a few times (and yes too many people seem to be saying "tipping hats"), I started wondering if it was about saluting the wrong people? (You know: to pay respect to a person of higher rank by touching the headgear/ because of course that comes form the way older tradition of taking off your hat or cap entirely.)
I've heard both. Tip my hat I've heard as "I tip my hat to you". Tipping ones hat is a show of acknowledgement. In my rural community it is as common as a wave or even a nod as we pass one another on the road. The tip your hand referring to not share information as you used it. I tip my hat to you for sharing!
Spent my entire childhood internally hearing "play it by year" instead of "by ear" and realized at some point as an adult that the latter obviously made more sense.
That one might be pretty common! I'm not sure if it's an eggcorn as it seems intentional when I've heard it used, though. Can deliberate eggcorns be used for puns and slang?@@MyPronounIsGoddess
Probably the most effective use of an ad in a TH-cam video, forcing watchers to actually watch the full ad and not skip ahead. Definitely deserves a like 👍
Artificial intelligence would probably not be able to produce this type of natural mistake or even understand it, which is what makes human language so beautiful!
I love language! My daughter was working retail years ago and a customer asked where the “fox fur” throws were. She told the customer that they didn’t carry anything like that. The customer insisted that the store had them at Christmas time - some looked like mink, some looked like leopard…. The woman was asking for “faux fur” throws. She told me about this later, and ever since we’ve used the word “fox” for anything fake and still laugh about it.
Years ago at work my coworkers and I got a hearty laugh over an ad that came in the mail for "Genuine faux pearls!" We started making up the backstory for them: they were found by natives of the Faux Islands, etc. We referred back to the Faux Islands for months. 😂
I thought it was intensive purposes for a long time too. I also thought people were saying don't take things or granite, as in sturdy like bedrock. Imagine my disappointment when I learned it was granted as in guaranteed.
In Danish we have the expression "Den tid, den sorg" which translates to "That time. that grief" basically meaning "We'll worry about that later, when it's relevant". The eggcorn of that is "Den tid den sover" translating to "That time is sleeping". It is very common.
13:42 a squib is still commonly used in practical special effects for TV and film. Predominantly when filming action scenes where characters get shot, they visually show the "bullet (or whatever) hitting the character. And yes, there is a digital version still named the same.
Not 100% sure which classification this counts as, but as a kid I thought that the phrase "so sue me" was actually one word "sosumi" that was just like a borrowed japanese word that meant something like "there's nothing to be done about it now" kinda like how one would use the phrase "c'est la vie". Went around saying this to adults when chided for things not knowing how flippant I was coming off.
not a native speaker, and for the longest of times I thought that the phrase "Suit yourself" was "Sue it yourself" as in, "Make your own judgement as to what you're missing out on here"
There's actually a sound file named sosumi, for the exact same reason you logically defaulted to that ... if you put it into wikipedia you should find the article on it.
One of my daughters once told me they had studied "ultra-violent light" in science class. She repeated it twice during the conversation, and then I screamed and tried to ward off the deathly blows of the sun. We both had a good laugh.
For years I heard and said “play it by year” explaining it to myself as something we aren’t going to fix now but let it grow on its own over time as it will. I was blown away when I learned it was “play it by ear” which made sense as well and better 😂
Sorry if this one has already been mentioned, but my favorite eggcorn was unknowingly exposed by the comedian Sean Jordan when he stated on a podcast that one should "throw that cosh right into the wind". Pretty funny reaction when his cohosts went from complete confusion to realizing that he had spent his entire life thinking that risk takers were "throwing cosh into the wind".
I would have to hear him say it, but are you sure this wasn't an intentional mis-speak? Like, when the kids say "rizz" as short for charisma? Adding "that" can make you sound folksy. "Throw that cosh to the wind, my dawg."
One I remember using as a child was "a pigment of my imagination." Given my ability to visualize in great detail with fine color differentiations and the fact that painting is a way of creating worlds where there was blankness before, it made perfect sense that people used the word for coloring agents to discuss imagination. Whereas I knew what a fig was and what a mint was, but had never heard the word "figment" outside of the phrase about imagination, so it wasn't until a few adults were condescendingly laughing about my use of "pigment" without explaining what the word was that I realized I'd been saying it wrong.
hah! this reminds me of when I thought "pain in the neck" was "paint in the neck". Not a very funny mistake, except that I have vivid memories of just staring at these paint cans in my house, just pondering over the expression for long periods of time. I knew what it meant, just couldn't figure out what the hell paint had to do with it. This went on for years! I don't think it counts as an eggcorn, though.
Those kinds of experiences - adults laughing w/o explaining to the kid - were just shy of traumatic for me as a kid. As an adult, I can understand what was going on, but as a child, it was just people laughing at me, which I read as disapproval. Maybe I was just over-sensitive as a kid.
@@elainebelzDetroit Oh, it was definitely traumatic for me. the message I got was worth laughing at, but not worth teaching the phrase that wouldn't set me up to be teased or discounted later. They probably thought I was over-sensitive, by which they meant I was choosing not to deal with my emotions. The truth was that I was an undiagnosed autistic, my nervous system is LITERALLY more sensitive than most. I was dealing with my emotions the best I could, but no one had thought to teach me how to manage social rejection that registered as literal physical pain. I have decided that most of society is actually under-sensitive, and they deal with that deficit by berating those who pick up on the trends and details and subtleties they miss.
My dad, who had been raised in the American Midwest by Southern parents, once asked my mother (who was raised in California) if she would cook him some arsh potatoes as a side dish for dinner. Mom puzzled over this for a full 10 minutes, then finally turned to my dad and said, "Do you mean Irish potatoes?" Dad had adopted his parents' pronunciation of the dish without realizing what it was they were saying.
Up until the end of the story, I thought it would be because of your German ancestry. Arsch (pronounced somewhat like arsh) literally means arse in German.
“if worse comes to worst” is meant to mean if a bad situation becomes a dire situation but almost everyone I know says “if worse comes to worse” … which basically is saying if the situation remains unchanged
“Worst” does not mean “more bad than worse”. Worse is the comparative and is only for 2 things. Worst is the superlative and is only for 3 or more. It’s a fallacy to think “oh man, it was worse already and now it’s worst” Correct usage: Chevy is worse than Ford. Pontiac is the worst of all.
You are the first TH-camr to actually induce me to sit through their sponsorship slot and listen to the pitch without skipping ahead. That was very clever. Well played!
For years I’ve alway thought we were “making ends meat” when my wife corrected me that it’s actually “making ends meet” referring to a tailor rather than beef trimmings.
The phrase 'Old Timer's Disease' was always used - by the folks I knew - as a light hearted variant (usually when teasing someone) to avoid talking about an actual disease. I imagine a few of these started out as fun wordplay.
Yes, I have heard it just as a joking reference to the kinds of things us old folks regularly experience, not the actual disease. I’m reminded of the lady whose pastor asked if she ever thought about the hereafter. “Yes,” she said, “every day. I’ll come into a room and wonder, ‘what did I come in here after.’” If you like long enough, you can relate to that.
I imagine you are right, wordplay is pretty common and people are very prone to using phrases they don't fully understand. ...Actually, this has a much more sinister relative now that I consider it, it's related to how presenting ironic opinions inevitably leads to dumb people not realizing you were being ironic and gradually attracting people who earnestly believe it. Think flat eartherism. In the history of the modern movement, which started in the 50s IIRC, it was obviously extremely fringe but there were a decent amount of people who embraced it ironically because it was so silly. It wasn't until the 2000s and the explosion of social media and youtube that we started seeing increasing numbers of people ACTUALLY believing that nonsense. Another example would be how the reddit subreddit "The Donald" was originally a joke subreddit because Trump was such a joke candidate and yet, for anyone who has the misfortune of interacting with American politics, we all know how that spiraled out of control eventually. It's a shame, because being ironic is a type of humor I appreciate and feel drawn to, but it needs to be used responsibly. Luckily, wordplay is much lower stakes and we can just laugh a little at people who are unfortunately fooled into sounding a little silly without any problems.
This portion of the video reminded me of a potential Japanese candidate: aruchūhaimzu (アル中ハイマズ), a decades‐old coining for drinking oneself blotto. The starting point was アル中, a typically Japanese shortening of arukōru chūdoku (アルコール中毒, literally "alcohol addiction.") I had to write "potential candidate" because my Japanese drinking buddies used it more or less deliberately to equate drunken stupor with the "brain frog" of Alzheimer's. BTW, decades ago, the term in vogue was chihoshō (地保証, dementia), but the katakana version of アルツハイマー has long taken over.
I have an example of an eggcorn from Italian. The phrase "d'alto bordo" means "high-class" or "high-profile". Its literal translation is "from the high side (of the ship)". The idea is that the higher your cabin was on the ship, the higher your prestige. However, because of the obscureness and historical distance of the expression, people often mistakenly say "d'alto borgo" instead, meaning "from a high(-class) borough/village".
I was absolutely positive that you wouldn't find an eggcorn that I've been using, as you boldly stated you would, since I've been obsessed with them for many a year. But by god, you got me. 'To the manner born'. I had no idea. Well done!
One pet peeve I’ve always had is when people say “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less”. It’s such a minor thing but it just pisses me off so much 😂
My favorite- that was not really wrong, it just looked funny on the sign- was a local State Farm insurance agent's business here in San Diego called "Pro State Farm"... just cracked me up that there was a farm for prostates...
here's an eggcorn in norwegian that i like! it's the phrase "å få jernteppe", which means to momentarily forget something you know or something you were about to say, like when you're doing a test in school and you _know_ you know the answer to this question but it just evaporated from your memory. in english, the phrase literally means "to get an iron curtain" (same origin as the metaphor used about the cold war!) and the common eggcorn is "å få hjerneteppe", literally "to get a brain curtain"
@@tom_4615 you can input the words into google translate and hear the norwegian text-to-speech voice say them. they're identical besides the eggcorn's extra "e" in the middle
I use the "correct" form of most of these phrases (the butt/buck naked controversy aside) because I read a lot and have seen them spelled out. I project that eggcorns will spread eggsponentially as our culture moves from word-based to audio and video.
I agree that reading really educates one away from eggcorns, at least in the last 200 years since spelling was standardized. Reading helps two ways- seeing a phrase spelled out correctly defines it, and a wider knowledge of the world explains orgins of phrases.
One has to read good source material. Social media is very active as text also; witness this forum interaction. Additionally, teenagers absorbing language & grammar from tweets are seeing many erroneous examples of language usage.
Similar - I also solve cryptic crosswords where wordplay may reference 'sounds like' or homonyms, which remind me of the write one to right down as the answer.
One I found myself using for years is "kitten kaboodle", which seemed delightful but was, in reality, "kit and kaboodle", a type of sewing kit. I'm let down that kittens are not somehow at the center of it.
There is a German phrase with the same meaning: „mit Kind und Kobold“ … which looks a great deal like "kit and kaboodle." The German phrase translated literally to "with kid and helper-house-spirit." A „Kobold“ was something like the Scandinavian nisse: helpful hidden-folk that would do little tasks if you were good to them and Followed the Rule [of the supernatural], but would play pranks on you if you were unkind to them. So to leave „mit Kind und Kobold“ meant that you were not only taking everything _and_ the kitchen sink, you were clearing out with the non-physical members of the house too!
Well if you need a phrase for mad I have a cat one for you "shitting kittens"(Man Tom is going to be shitting kittens when he finds out.) I dont think it came from anywhere else. But its also funny 😂😂😂😂. And while its not got cat in the phrase it- "Bitter shitbox"(Karen is such a bitter shitbox" kinda implies a litterbox in my mind. Ive been using both for years.
Words that are misheard and therefore mistranslated: 1: When first seeing a Ferris wheel he/she thought they said "Paris wheel" and therefore it is now called a "Parisienne wheel" (Pariserhjul) in Swedish. 2: The most (in-)famous mistake must be the Grimm Brothers tale of Cinderella when translating if from French. The slipper was made of squirrel pelt/fur (vaire?) and not verre (glass). That mistake is still very much alive and kicking. Greetings from Sweden 🇸🇪.
I heard an alternate theory that it was supposed to be a "grass" slipper, but that doesn't make any sense in the context of French. Vaire/verre, that makes much more sense.
How about "Vår fru dagen" becoming "våffeldagen"? We even eat waffles on that day. (For non-Swedes. Vår fru dagen means "Our Lady Day" literally and is the Swedish name for the Feast of the Annunciation. It sounds close to "våffeldagen" which means "waffle day".)
I once had a student email me and ask for the copy of the rule brick for an assignment. I thought it was a clever eggcorn for rubric - a rubric does sort of have the rules for an assignment and sometimes the chart format is brick shaped. I think a lot of eggcorns happen because people speak more than they read, especially casual speech that is more idiomatic.
This makes sense especially because i read a LOT as a kid and recognized all the eggcorns in the video except for damp squib (maybe a dialect thing? I'm very American) as incorrect.
I had a wee woman at work who continually dropped malapropisms and eggcorns throughout the day. My favourite one was when someone was rushing a job. Instead of "patience is a virtue" she always said "patience is a virgin" - this from a woman with eight children too!
I grew up with furniture made of iron rods welded together. For years, I thought it was called 'rod iron' furniture; 'wrought iron' made sense when I ran across it, but 'rod iron' fit my experience just fine.
In most cases, "wrought iron" is actually steel. Iron is an element, and steel is made mostly of iron. But things that are made (for all purposes) of just iron are very, very rare. Even cast iron has a lot of carbon mixed with the iron. More carbon, even, than steel would have. Long story, I know.
My youngest daughter had a couple of fantastic egg corns as a toddler. She used to think the British DIY store B and Q was called "be in a queue", she wasn't wrong! She also thought Coleslaw was called Cold Slop, not her favourite food.
My daughter was convinced that a cellphone was actually a sell-a-phone. Her logic seemed to be that at the mall there were many kiosk stores that sell cellphones but they never sell landline phones.
Cold Saw/Sore is another term I've chanced upon. Kinda weird, someone asking if I want some cold saw at the BBQ. Nah mate, I'm good, keep your herpes, got my own issues to deal with without adding more to the pile 😂
At the start of every month, my daughter would say, "A pinch and a punch, for the first day of the munch". (instead of month) She thought wedding ceremonies said , "Do you take *Ladys Name* for your awfully wetted wife?". (instead of Lawfully wedded wife) And When you listen to a conversation that you're not privy to, known as "Eaves drop', she called it "Ears drop". So cute.
Here's an eggcorn I heard many years ago on RTE: Many non-Irish speakers were alleged to mumble their way through the national anthem at a sporting event, and finish by boldly singing "Shovin' Annie around the green" for the last line, which in Irish is "Seo libh canaig amhrán na bhfiann" (We'll sing a Soldier's Song) - probably not an eggcorn, but one of the other phenomena discussed in your excellent video.
"Card shark" is one that comes to mind for me. "Card sharp" is the original phrase with "sharp" meaning somebody that is good at playing cards. But "card shark" makes perfect sense and drives home the point of the meaning of the phrase even better than the original.
@@MacNerfer so much so that we call (in poker anyway) bad gamblers Fish, big gamblers with lots of money are whales. My favourite saying when there are fish about is "don't tap the glass" i.e. don't give the bad players too much advice, you might wake up the fish
“I mean, what is a squib?” Exactly. While some eggcorns (e.g. “Post-dramatic stress disorder”) may arguably by “wrong”, others of the “wet your appetite” type are arguably _corrections to outdated language_ rather than mistakes. Often the power of the idiom keeps a word like “deserts” in “just deserts” beyond its shelf life, and the record eggcorn represents a useful re-analysis that actually makes the old phrase more relevant to its current users.
I have 2 meanings for Squib for you. 1) In firearms shooting, a Squib load is a cartridge that malfunctions when fired, by having an insufficient gunpowder to propel the bullet clear of the barrel, creating a dangerous situation where the fired bullet is now an obstruction in the barrel and should the shooter fire a subsequent round, could cause catastrophic damage and injury from the detonation of the firearm. The word Squib is partially in reference to the "squeak" noise sometimes heard from the firing remaining contained inside the barrel of the firearm, instead of the bang. 2) In popular culture in the Harry Potter movies, a Squib is a non-magical person born to 2 magical parents, (in the films/ books are the characters Arabella Figg ( who watches over Harry near his Aunt's home) , and Argus Filch , the Hogwart's school caretaker.
Interesting, @@scottcrawford3745! The usage I was aware of before this video was in Hollywood special effects, where a squib is very small explosive used, for example, to burst a packet of fake blood to simulate an injury.
A favorite of mine that I just found out my 57 year old husband has said all his life, "Finders keepers, losers sweepers." He said, "yeah, finders get to keep, but losers have to sweep up the floor look for what they lost". I stammered, "yeah but, but...but... nevermind...that makes too much sense".
🤣😂 My otherwise VERY intelligent, Bachelors degree’d and vice President of sales and marketing husband asked me the other day at dinner if “ends meat” is keto. I said “what the hell is that.” He said that his mom would never make it but talked about it all the time when he was little. After a lot of back and forth I couldn’t believe what it boiled down to. I thought he was playing me but he very much thought “making ends meet” was some succulent dish that they couldn’t afford. I couldn’t believe my ears, that he’d not heard that phrase as an adult and put it together. Now I tell this story to his friends and colleagues every chance I get 🤣😂
@@scrumps101 haha! Thanks for telling that story. I enjoyed hearing about it! Goes to show that no matter how intelligent or educated we are, sometimes there are simply glitches in our brains sometimes when it comes to the "perception" of what we hear, and how our brains try to make sense of it. Loved your story. Tfs
Squib is STILL used quite regularly to describe small explosives in contexts of special effects, airbag inflators, and demolition wherein they trigger a larger device or simply simulate a bullet strike in your favorite action film. Great fun Rob
Squib is also the term used to describe a misfire of a bullet from a gun where the round goes off but there is not enough force from the gunpowder to push the projectile all the way down the barrel. It's actually quite dangerous if you don't catch it and chamber another round, but I digress.. In the military, I was an Aviation Ordinance Tech, and a squib was, much like you are describing, a small explosive cap used to ignite a much larger device/explosion. Having these as my examples in my life experience, I have always understood squib to literally mean a small explosion or explosive device. I never thought to look that one up to see if it was accurate lol
I don't know where this falls but I work in pest control in Texas and there are a lot of little geckos. The insurance commercials for Geico with the gecko have confused a lot of people who now complain about all the giecos they have around the house 😂
When cycling back from school, I need to ride uphill for a while through the edge of the forest to avoid the centre of the village and so I am left alone with my thoughts for a while and often come up with various stories and ideas on the way, so I decided to nickname it: Ponder Lane or Wander Road, the latter because you wander and roam over it and “wander” (as I thought it was called because you rove around in your thoughts) in your mind. I told my father when I got home about half an hour ago, and he asked me whether I meant “wander” or “wonder”, I said wander because I thought wonder was only for miracles and the sort, I was wrong and now I can’t choose whether to call it “Wander Road” or “Wonder Road” so for now it will only be “Ponder Lane”.
There's a really good example of an eggcorn that is probably so old and commonly used, that the original version is all but forgotten: Parting shot, originally, is Parthian shot: named after the mounted Partian archers and their ability to turn around in their saddles and release an accurate arrow shot while retreating.
@@johnle6982 Not really. The Parthians were an empire that existed alongside the Romans, and were considered in many ways their arch nemesis as the Romans were never able to defeat them and suffered some horrific defeats trying (look for Historia Civilis' video about the battle of Carrhae for a chilling example). They weren't some wild horde, but a very ancient, well established state by the time the Romans came along.
Ha ha “nothing to ride home about” Growing up in the country side and riding horses, I’m surprised that I didn’t believe this also. Too funny. Thanks for sharing this 🤣
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I would love to see a video on English words which came from Indian languages. Please make a video on that. Please 🙏🙏🙏
That was unquestionably the best VPN ad of all time!
as soon as a vpn ad-vert started I stopped watching ....
It makes no deference to me... Hay! Ewe axed ferret.
Feeble position 🤣🤣🤣. In Texas they use "butt naked" all the time. When I moved there I thought it was just a Texan thing.
A friend of mine had always called a chest of drawers "Chester Drawers" and - not sure this is an eggcorn but - a friend of my husband's believed as a child that there was a household deity called the Time Being because her parents left temporary offerings to it, as they would say, "We can leave that there for the time being."
wow "the time being" is one of the best ones here. It's geniusly hilarious
I thought it was Chester draws for a long time. Chester is just where i thought the furniture originated from.
@@Edward_HodgesIt's probably near Chesterfield
You just converted me to belief in the Time Being. Every time I hear or use that phrase from now on I’ll be thinking of appeasing some wrathful temporal deity.
I think I have found enlightenment!!! 😎
I hate in-video ad reads, but that was the most inventive way I've seen a TH-camr incorporate one. Good job, Rob.
I use a sponsor block but it skipped to the list and asking how many did you get. A good way to force one to go back and watch the ad, quite inventive, it wouldn't surprise me if it was done on purpose 😁
I swear he uses the ad reads to have as much linguist fun as possible.
I usually fast-forward the sponsorship spiel, I may have to go back and listen to this one.
I too watched a whole sponsor ad for the first time ever
Yes, it was a clever way to get us to watch the sponsor spiel. Bravo!
When I was at school, my English teacher told me not to worry about spelling or grammar because in the future there will always be autocorrect, and for that I am internally grapefruit.
😂😂😂
Autocorrect is like having a very small elf living in your phone who is, unfortunately, extremely drunk. That's why it's wrong so often.
NICE
Except autocorrect always makes me say things I didn't Nintendo
Doggy Dog World is the one I said wrong my whole life, and I found out like 2 years ago it was Dog EAT Dog World. It blew my mine because it makes infinitely more sense to me
I worked with a guy who said, "That's part of the course." I told him it was, "That's par for the course." He didn't believe me. And he was a golfer!
Well "par" is part of the course...
😂 this is the best thing I've read on the internet this year
.
@@matthewcox431not if you play like me.
did he have a big four head?
I retired from assembly line work. Almost everyone had "corporal" tunnel. The first time I heard it I laughed and said it must be a major pain.
And a general distraction from getting work done. You can sure admiral their can-dew spewit, though.
Not carpet tunnel?
@@two_tier_gary_rumain nope, corporal tunnel. But I like carpal tunnel.
@@rottndachs I've heard it called carpet tunnel. Never did work out what the underlaying issue was.
My old boss said CORPORATE tunnel 😂
My favorite eggcorn is "Duck Tape" which is a rather remarkable DOUBLE eggcorn. Most people think duck tape is the incorrect form of duct tape and that the name of the product refers to its application to duct work. But the problem is that that "duct tape" isn't actually made for ventilation. If you research the history of the tape, you would learn that it was originally named for the cloth like substrate known as "duck" that gives it strength.
So it was originally called "duck tape," but over time, it became known as duct tape because it seems like it's designed for ducts (even though it isn't). Ironically "duct tape" became so ubiquitous that the brand name "Duck Tape" was presumed to be a play on words and is now a registered trademark in the US, which should not be possible considering the proper original name for the product was always "duck tape".
I used to use duct tape all the time for duct work and got very frustrated when I found out that all of my duct tape was failing on the heat of the duct. Some of the duct work is buried in the walls and I can't replace it now !!
@@sharonshookup The fact that duck tape is ubiquitously referred to as "duct tape" and that duck tape is now trademarked is one of the greatest crimes ever committed against the english language, second only to Merriam-Webster literally using the words "not literally" in their definition of "literally", which I can't even think about without shaking with rage.
Duck tape was used in ww2 for tapping pants legs do they did not get wet feet hence duck tape
@@VinceBlack536 Sounds like apocryphal. The product was already called duck tape prior to WWII because it used cotton duck as a substrate.
All Band Aids are adhesive bandages, but not all adhesive bandages are Band Aids . The same goes for Duck Tape and duct tape .
My favorite and most frustrating is when someone insist something is a “mute” point instead of a “moot” point.
I prefer the version from Friends. “It’s a moo point. It’s like a cow, it doesn’t matter!” 😜
@@Barghaest yeh a cows opinion, classic Joey
@@alexbarber1566exactly!
The "moo point" would be a muglare (not sure on spelling) wouldn't it, as Joey was commonly trying to sound educated like his friends who went to college, but he just didn't get it.
But the moot point/mute point most definitely are eggcorns especially since, if I remember it correctly, moot means unspoken of where as mute means not spoken/speaking. Either way, they are unheard.
With you on this. Thank you!
I just shared this video on Facebook with the caption "I like this sort of thing" and a friend of mine commented "It's just a phrase you're going through" Which I thought was rather good.
Ba dump tiss
🤣 love that one!
‚Just a phrase I‘m going through‘ is actually a very enjoyable book on linguistigs by Davis Crystsl I had almost forgotten. Thanks for the reminder. :-)
One of the best jokes from MASH. 'They have an edible complex, it's where you can't love any food other than your mother's cooking'
I think my favorite mash joke is a bit where Margret keeps answering questions for Frank to Henry and Henry says “Frank if you don’t shut up I’m going to have to punch her in the mouth”….. also basically any joke in a scene that has col. Flagg
Yes, jokes! I'm sure they can explain the number of these egg corns!
Hawkeye to Margaret... "You're so angry when you're beautiful." I say it all the time to my wife. Great stuff!
There is a charming eggcorn in Afrikaans, Bromkatjies (pronounced bromkaikees). It is a mis-hearing of the English word bronchitis, the chest infection. But Bromkatjies literally translates thus: brom is like a grumbling hum, like what you do when you are unhappy with something, and katjies are kittens. So when you have bronchitis, you have grumbling kittens. Perfect.
oh this might be a phono-semantic matching actually! they're very interesting too
South African is so imaginative dutch :-). I just pronounce bronchitis the dutch spelling way..
Love that!
It really is terrible having grumbling kittens, what do you egg speck? Purr-fection?
Hi there fellow South African!!
I once emailed a boss to let them know I’d be sending them “the whole kitten caboodle” the next day. She let me know she couldn’t stop laughing at the thought of what a “kitten caboodle” would look like, but in future I may want to write “the whole kit and caboodle” instead. Not sure if that counts as an eggcorn, but whatever it is, it still makes me smile.
Sounds like an eggcorn to me. It also made me laugh - sounded like something someone would knit and put a kitten in.
I vote to rename a litter of kittens to a caboodle.
Good sport!
Me too😂
I now need to see a kitten kaboodle. Also I caught that typo immediately after I typed it, but I'll leave it in because that too is interesting on this topic.
Probably not a egg-corn, but in a small town in Ghana, I once read a sign on the front of a bar, 'You are almost welcome', instead of ALL MOST. Made me laugh!
Reminds me of the Karaoke play list that included, "Tom between two lovers"
@@Mephistahpheles
“rn” looks the same as “m”, all most. That’s a visual/aural version of an egg corn.
Well it makes sense. Because it’s at the front, you have to enter before you are fully welcomed.
That sounds like a deliberate joke.
Once when my uncle was seriously ill, my aunt wrote that he was "in tents of care", which I thought was kind of lovely
As an ICU RN, I, also, think “in tents-of care” is lovely. ❤
@JaimeMesChiens Especially oxygen tents. Are they even used any more?
Same thing really, for all intensive purposes…
@@michaelwisniewski6047 *...intents and purposes...
LOL
Not really a foreign egg corn but I met someone from Colombia a couple of years ago. His English was pretty good but still learning. He told me that up until recently he thought our expression when leaving was “Happy Good day” instead of “have a good day” which, if you think about it makes sense because we have other sentiments that we express with “happy” e.g. Happy Birthday! Happy anniversary! Happy Mother’s Day! Etc. I thought it was pretty cute.
I like it !
Happy good day to you !
I’m totally going to start using that phrase. I love it. Happy good day to you!
@@habibakamel happy good day to you
Let's adopt it
I need this to be an actual phrase in the English language. It sounds super sweet! Happy good day!
My daughter when she was four asked if she could put some food in the garden outside her bedroom window. When I asked why she said "To feed her Gardening Angel".
😅😅😅
My son called Saber tooth tigers ...Saver tooth tigers... I guess that made sense to him.... because he was saving teeth for the tooth fairy....?😂
I wish that was true. I definitely need a gardening fairy.
HR professionals often say "gardening leave" instead of "garden leave".
😍
My friend and I are both around 70 years old and we have a running conversation about the egg corns that younger people produce. Our guess is that our vocabulary came from listening to parents and from reading a lot of older books that are no longer required reading in high school and college. Also younger people get more of their education from listening than from reading. Even if the phrase made no sense to you, if you read it over and over you will either just accept it or go look it up. Any phrase that you hear but don't read that uses now-archaic words is bound to be interpreted on the fly. Thanks for a fascinating presentation; I had no idea there was a specific name for this phenomenon.
Baby boomer here and our people watched Password and played Scrabble and loved reading in bed for fun. Love the English language. My mother would say: “see it say it and write it”to learn it.
I don't know about you, but it was always Buck Naked.
Archaic Buck for male slave, sold naked, though most of us didn't know it came from a slave sale.
@@merrywriterb7811
But if nobody knew about the slave sale aspect of the term, wouldn’t buck naked make sense, as in a buck running in the forest naked. Buck naked. Why the term butt naked is used I’ve never heard explained.
Like a cigarette butt?
A butt joint in woodworking or welding? Buck naked makes sense, butt naked makes no sense.
@@ronsamborski6230 butt is a shortened informal form of buttocks. So if you have no clothes on, everyone can see your bare buttocks, or your bare ass, or your bare butt. You are butt naked.
@@ronsamborski6230I'm a Brit and I always assumed it ment deer too so that was the older version
I recently found out I've been using a german eggcorn for many, many years:
the german word for the sound-producing lamella in the mouthpiece of woodwind instruments like the saxophone or clarinet is "Blättchen".
It's the diminutive of the word "Blatt" or "Rohrblatt" which translates to the english "reed".
Since the first time I heard someone mention it, I thought they said "Plättchen", which means "small sheet" and perfectly made sense to me, due to the shape of the reed: thin and flat (or german: "platt").
I thought I was correct for at least 20 years. Now I know I eggcorned myself.
Soft plosives indicate origin (or bringing up) in the South of Germany (or in Austria).
Rund um Berlin oder Hannover passieren solche "Weichheiten" seltener.
My mother is German. I never learned the language, just individual words, like body parts and such, when I was a kid. Took me a long time to realize that I was not learning the actual words, but made-up versions ending in the diminutive -chen. Glad I never embarrassed myself by sharing them with other Germans, though I may have misinformed some classmates.
@@luna-p Fingerchen, Ärmchen, Beinchen, Näschen, Penischen, ...
@@doubleT84 Lolol
As a non-native English speaker, I was proud to notice that I have been using all of these correctly. But being a non-native speaker might have actually helped, because a lot of the English expressions I've learned have come through reading literature rather than growing up hearing them in everyday conversation.
Wait u cin lern stuf from readin?
It's nothing to do with not being a native speaker, and all to do with reading. There's no confusion when reading.
Also a non-native speaker. I'm your typical grammar nazi, besserwisser, and no-fun-at-parties guy, according to the interwebs. So I really try my best not to point things out nowadays. And I believe I'm actually quite funny IRL, despite this flaw. But I think that my spelling OCD actually gets worse when I spot native English speakers making these "mistakes". Like, I try so hard to master this language, yet I can't trust the knowledge of the people speaking it, or something. But as you and @matthewbartsh9167 suggest, I think it all has to do with reading, i.e. literacy.
Meaning, I guess, I don't agree with Geoff Pullum (in the video). I _do_ think this has to do with illiteracy. That is, not reading enough books or novels or whatnot to sufficiently support your use of the language. Although at the same time, I definitely agree it has nothing to do with stupidity per se, and I can see the imaginative aspects of coming up with... personal interpretations.
Yes! Read broadly and frequently 😊
In German, songs with lyrics that are often misheard are called "Agathe Bauer" songs. The story is that someone had called a radio station requesting the song about "Agathe Bauer". The song that the person actually wanted to hear was "The Power" by Snap, which has the lyrics "I've got the power" in it. Another example is "Anneliese Braun"; which is supposed to be "All the leaves are brown" from "California dreaming" by the Mamas and the Papas.
Reminds me of the Mexican Radio station one. The guy requests "Esos son Reebok o son Nike" (literally "are those Reebok or Nike). Turns out he was requesting. "This is the rhythm of the night" by the Eurythmics
Hau auf die Leberwurst- Hope of deliverance. :)
I want Annalise Braun to be my drag name.
There are two books about those misheard lyrics. Though the books have pretty unfortunate titles... de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_wei%C3%9Fe_Neger_Wumbaba
these two came also to my mind as soon as he started talking about that.
I knew a fully grown adult at work who once asked me for a "vanilla folder" (instead of manila). I almost didn't catch it, but I asked him to clarify. Turns out his whole life up to that point he really thought they were vanilla folders because of their color. I asked him if he calls brown ones chocolate folders.
He calls them poo folders
A former coworker of my mother's once described a movie she had recently seen as having too much "sexual in-the-window" instead of "sexual innuendo". My mom, sisters, and I still say it incorrectly for laughs👍
I love this. My mother did this type of thing so often. My sister and myself also have this trait of turning words inside out and backwards. To have my mom, sister and myself engaged in a conversation almost sounded like another language besides English. All three of us would not miss a beat and understand everything. Dad would have to leave the room. Over whelming to a word purist.
This should be called a haycorn. The wrong form doesn't make much sense.
Sexual in-the-window?
So you've been to Amsterdam as well I see.
Hope you saw the Holy Stroopwafel while you were there.
@@andraspongracz5996 In the Netherlands you can see women in windows. It's at the Red Light District.
Now that's sexual in-the-window
sexxual in-your-endo
Gardener Snake vs Garter Snake has been one for me ever since I was a child. Had no idea what a garter was, and since the snakes were harmless and found near our garden, it made sense to call them gardener snakes.
Even after learning what a garter was, I still prefer "garden snake". They have a lot more connection to gardens than garters.
Alternatively, guarder snake. Makes sense when you're a child and an adult's just introduced you to the concept of these snakes and their potential benefits to one's garden (eating pests).
It sounds like every version of the name makes sense, except the "real" one@@bearcat1868
Same.
Not an eggcorn. Mispronouncing actual words is NOT and eggcorn.
A child I babysat long ago, asked me to polish her finger tails and toe tails. “Nails were in wood, but tails are on the end of things”…The child was three years old when she explained this brilliant eggcorn.
As I read this comment, I puzzled over it. I had subconsciously converted tails to nails before the explanation. So the explanation was completely out of context. A nonsequitor.
The logic of toddlers can really make you question your assumptions sometimes.
Reminds me of my son calling a sidewalk a sideblock since the squares of cement appeared to be blocks lining the side of a driveway or lawn.
Cute but not an eggcorn. Thats just a child not pronouncing a word.
@mackdeen7021 if you read it properly , it makes sense. Fingernails are at the end of fingers and toenails are at the ends of toes, the tail ends if you will.
I always said, "buttload" of something. A friend corrected me, saying it was "boatload."
So I looked it up.
While boatload is correct, so is buttload.
"In the United States, a butt is a unit of measurement that is equal to 126 gallons. It is also known as a pipe and is used to measure wine. A butt is technically two hogsheads, which is half a butt. Since a standard wine barrel holds around 60 gallons, a buttload of wine is roughly two barrels."
Yeah, buttload is definitely a different word meaning the same thing. I don’t think it comes from boatload but from just using butt as meaning a lot, like a butt-ton.
No both are right buttons is just funnier
Well if two hogsheads are a buttload, then how much is a fuckton? 🤔🧐
Another would be a "shed-load" of something and its close-sounding partner.
I have no idea whose butt they measured to set the standard. JK the word butt (then bytt) meant both the end of something and cask or barrel all the way back before the Norman Conquest.
In his autobiography, Anthony Burgess wrote an eggcorn on purpose: "Isle of Yew" instead of "I love you." He also wrote that as a child in church, he couldn't understand why everybody was talking about the cross-eyed bear (the cross I bear).
He was thoughtful enough to die immediately after finishing his autobiography; so, it's completely up to date.
Thanks for making these videos, Rob. They're fabulous.
The bear has a name: Gladly, the cross-eyed bear.
And who can forget that classic 1950s TV sitcom about the "Isle of Lucy."
Oh, I thought it was a small island where female sheep reside. Isle of Ewe.
Since this video is all about pedantics, I'd say "Isle of Yew" is not an eggcorn, because it doesn't retain the same meaning.
I'd suggest that Isle of Yew is actually a Mondegreen. Still fun.
When I was a waitress, I worked with a guy that was so confused because his customer asked for “camel milk tea”. I still crack up about it. She was asking for camomile tea! This brought up someone else thinking spiders where called “deadly long legs” instead of “daddy long legs.”
bone apple tea
😂
I used to call those spiders "dandy long legs."
I waitresses at a Greek restaurant and owner friends would ask for fresh milk when asked if they wanted cream with their coffee
@@jennywoody1655I don't get it.
Although I never knew about "egg corns" at the time, a fine example comes to mind from the TV show Friends.
Joey says something about a "moo point". Monica (I think) says, "Don't you mean a moot point?"
And Joey replies, "No, a moo point. It's like a cow's opinion: it just doesn't matter."
That joke is udderly terrible.
Teats(to each) their own.
Oof - I hear "mute point" all the time (rather than "moot").
People in the comments are really milking the puns 😂
The Nexflix show "The Ranch" and the "Fish's Cycle" (Has no legs so can't pedal!) - for Vicious Cycle
My favourite is a child who, when ask by his mum what he did at school today, replied “We watched a film on many evil castles”
To be fair,they are quite spooky.
My mother and I were joking around when she forgot someone's name and said she must have old timer's disease. I replied, "Thats OK, Mom, I have mentalpause." We both got a chuckle out of that. But actually, I don't think I've ever used any of those eggcorns. I've always read a lot, and when you see those common phrases in print, it's not as likely that you'll use them incorrectly.
I've been using old timer's disease intentionally for decades. The first person I heard it from was me. Indeed, I have never heard it anywhere else until this video. It's just such an appropriately sounding play on Alzheimer's. It just makes sense. By other favorite has been "bass ackwards" for "ass backwards". That being not an eggcorn, it is still demonstratabley funny in abuse of language.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I've most often learnt of these phrases in print, so I don't think I've miss heard any.
But I've seen old timers disease before and I thought it was a charming way of saying Alzheimers disease. I honestly hope it become a thing. 😂
@@dahasolomon7314 From the comments, it appears that it is not only a thing but so obviously humorous that it keeps being re-discovered.
@@johnfitzgerald8879 I think 'bass ackwards' is categorised as a Spoonerism.
Like when I use "shaking a tower" for 'taking a shower'. It even works in the past tense. I shook a tower.
When your brain works faster than language you can get bored and start messing up the way you say things on "porpoise". I read a lot too so much of my word learning comes from the printed page. It makes it so that I don't have egg corns but there are complicated or borrowed words from other languages that I always said wrong in my head until I heard it spoken out loud. "deus ex machina" would be an example of that. I assumed the "i" would be the French i sound. Nope.
The Hong Kong flu pandemic broke out in 1968. My brother had no knowledge of a place called Hong Kong but, with all the coughing going on, to his five year old mind it made perfect sense to think people were calling it the Honk-Honk flu. 😁
Oh that is just precious! 😂
He was just predicting Bird Flu.
woah like Hong Kong phuey
Funny
Brill!!! 😂😂😂
Just a day after watching this wonderful video, my wife received a little nugget in a work document. "... a last stitch effort." We think it fits! Thanks for the videos!
Works beautifully if you are a knitter/crocheter/sewist!
Have you forgotten about the Piglet's version of eggcorns? He always picked up "haycorns", and as a renowned specialist in the matter of acorns, he was surely right. Down with eggcorns, long live haycorns.
In Japanese before kids can read kanji and they just write everything in kana, it's often believed the word for watermelon (スイカ), suika is sui-ka (水果) which is water-fruit. But it's actually su-ika (西瓜), meaning western-melon.
This just tickled my brain in so many different ways! 😁👍
Interesting. In China, the writing is the same, and xi-gua (西瓜) also means "watermelon", while shui-guo (水果) mean's fruit in general.
Score one for Chinese! Japan’s super-simple pronunciation seems like a blessing until you realize it’s a curse. Everything’s a farking homophone.
In the old Partridge in a Pear tree carol, the Americans completely lost the meaning of ‘four colly birds’ by substituting the words ‘calling birds’. The original song used the word “colly” to mean sooty black (black birds), we get the words coal and colliery from the same root.
Thank you for explaining that. Since I was a kid I wondered what four "calling" birds meant. And the derivation of coal and collier are interesting too.
@@DarqJestor Etymology is a fascinating subject. The Chambers dictionary of Etymology is a great starting place 😄
@@markkettlewell7441 Thanks so much. It does sound quite fascinating. I will definitely check it out. 🙂
That's fascinating. Thanks for pointing it out.
Most modern versions also have "Five golden rings" which most likely is a mishearing of another bird the "goldring" which actually fits the bird theme of those verses.
As a Catholic kid I used to hear the song- spoken communal prayer as "bless this sour food" instead of bless this our food". It made sense to me because the wine was awfully sour to a kid's taste and the wafers tasted mostly stale, so soured. I always wondered why we were choosing such an important prayer to complain about the food!
Omg I would say bless this our lord 😂
My wife used to think it was the petrol light rather than the perpetual light. Which makes egg corn sense as petrol burns.
i remember a kid's book that had a bit with the character being offered "toad food and feel awful" for supper (tofu, falafel)
"O'er the ramparts we washed..." instead of "ramparts we watched" in the "Star-Spangled Banner" by Francis Scott Key.
For years I though it was:
“And stand beside her,
And guide her,
By the light, with the light
From a bulb”
Because, hey, light comes from bulbs. 🤪
I love explaining how "balls out" and "balls to the wall" are not dirty at all, while conversely "balls deep" is positively filthy.
I could google it, but I think you enjoy telling me how the first two arent dirty. I honestly thought all three were in the same ballpark of dirtyness in some way. Dont explain balls deep, I got that one.
I knew a guy that was sick all the time, but it was psycho-systematic. He also dropped his jar of cherries once and smashed it to figurines but didn’t get mad. My hand’s off to him!
The favourite one that I ever heard was when my wife and I were guests at a wedding reception and another guest was telling us about her friend who had been injured and had to go to the emergency room at the hospital. Her injuries were so bad that she had to be transferred to the "drama ward" instead of trauma ward. The story continued for several minutes with numerous references to the "drama ward". The first time, we assumed it was a slip of the tongue caused by the open bar. By the fifth or sixth time, we realized that she assumed it was the "drama ward" because it was very dramatic. Over thirty years later, my wife and I still jokingly refer to it that way.
to be fair hospitals do have theatres
That's a fantastic eggcorn!
The lady who helped my mom clean the house often had to stay home because her very close veins were hurting.
In the UK we don’t have “trauma wards” or “emergency rooms” so I assume this must be American.
@@thesushifiend North American, but Canadian to be precise.
My mother considered herself the paragon of decorum and as such always spoke euphemistically when referring to topics she considered socially sensative. In our house "butt" was a four-letter word, and "buttocks" was little better, so she often used "derriere" to refer to one's "nether regions." When I was seven or eight years old, my piano teacher held a recital, and one of the older students played a tune called "Londonderry Air." I couldn't imagine why someone would play a tune about an English person's nether regions.
That was the melody used for the song "Danny boy"
Its just the derry air.
sensItive
😂😂😂
😂
2:27 “Inference” is such a great word for what happened. It’s as creative and descriptive as it is charitable. Sensitive, intuitive but also very accurate. I guess that’s why he’s a linguist.
9:13 And “creative intelligence” 😂 Brilliant
Man, I was feeling good about myself for most of this video, but true to your promise you did finally get me with one: just "desserts."
Yes, that is the only one I didn’t know too!
Yup, guilty ditto
Me too. Now I have to look up how Deserts makes any sense.
@@artomatt It comes from the same root as "deserve", that's how it makes sense.
I'd actually argue that "Just desserts" is a folk etymology instead of an eggcorn. Unless I'd missed something in the definition. I feel like "just desserts" has taken over as the standard here.
I remember reading in Reader's Digest many years ago about a woman who moved to the New York City/New Jersey area and began copying a phrase she heard locals saying about something expensive costing 'a nominal egg'. She said it for quite a while before it hit her one day. What they were saying was 'an arm and a leg' with the strong regional accent.
I grew up in that area and can confirm if I say "an arm and a leg" in my nana's accent (which is heavier than mine) it sounds just like "a nominal egg." What a great one!
lol. That was good!
Is it still an eggcorn if I use the wrong phrase deliberately? For example, I will refer to “old timer’s disease” deliberately when speaking with people who know that I know that the correct term is “Alzheimer’s disease” when I want to reinforce in-group bonding by using a shared witticism. (Yes, I realize that you may judge me a terrible person for making fun of other’s honest mistakes, and I won’t attempt to defend my behavior here.)
Ironically eggs nowadays do cost an arm and a leg
@@CiroMastino Oh, but you missed that one by a few weeks. The prices came back down already.
Sometimes there are deliberate and clever malapropisms, particularly in marketing:- I cannot name the camping store, it may no longer exists, but their winter sale ad is legendary:-
“Now is the winter of our discount tents”
I love that, but I'm pretty sure an intentional malapropism is really just a pun.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
If the store no longer exists, would that make the slogan past tents?
@@FitzyCify, oh you’re GOOOOD 😂😂
Yeah, a lot of them come from slogans, word play or jokes.
Reminds me of an old joke:
A man is talking to his therapist. “Hey Doc, i keep having this recurring dream, I’m a wigwam I’m a tepee I’m a wigwam I’m a tepee I’m a wigwam I’m a tepee!
Therapist say, “relax, you’re two tents.”
I once heard a coworker say "That was the straw that brought the camel back" 😄
I can only think of a mondegreen that amused me. A girl talking to her grandfather asks if they can sing the ‘Pie Weighing’ song. Her grandfather asks her what she means, and the girl replies, “you know - somewhere over the rainbow, weigh a pie”.
Another entertaining and educational video, Rob.
Being a Scot, I'm familiar with the Bonny Earl o' Moray ballad, and know the correct words, but I didn't know this was the source of mondegreen - a word which always puzzled me.
I was musically precocious, and enthusiastically sang hymns at church before I started school and learned to read. When the chorus for "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder" I was singing, "When the roll is called a pyonder" even though I had no idea what a pyonder was or what it had to do with heaven.
My ex husband always left when the cleaning lady arrived - her name was Lorraine - hence my son used to sing Rod Stewart's song "When Lorraine came, I thought you'd leave ....."
@@tedscout4304 And the Creedence Clearwater Revival band wrote that song, 'Who'll stop Lorraine?'
I pledge an eagle to the flag of the United States of America...
I had a chuckle when I overheard two people talking about their past woes and they both agreed that "it was all water under the fridge". I've used it a few times since to get a bit of a laugh. Where would we be without occasionally using our malapropisms for their comic "affect"
Yeah, you know, like when you drop an ice cube and can't be bothered picking it up so you just kick it under there where it melts into a puddle you neither notice nor care about.
😂 that's brilliant, definitely adding it to my vernacular
Also an example of catachresis - misuse of grammar for comic effect. My favourite of those being Interplod from Only Fools and Horses. It will never be Interpol for me ever again.
I use "take it for granite" regularly for the humor value. Not to mention that I also regularly refer to a thing called "the interwebs" ;)
@@oldsguy354 It's a deep-seeded problem.
As a kid in Germany, I misheard the word for petrol station (“Tankstelle” = “fill-up place”) as “Stankstelle” (= “stink place”), which, not having a concept for filling up a tank but smelling petrol vapours, made a lot more sense to me
There's a chain of gas (petrol) stations in Idaho called Stinker.
That's a funny one you'd get away with- if humour existed in Germany.
And today I learned that "stank" isn't just a recent slang for smelling really bad, but from German.
On a very similar note, in India, a petrol station is most commonly called "Petrol bunk". It's weird because they don't call it that anywhere else. The closest term used elsewhere is "Petrol pump". It was probably an eggcorn, that later became folk etymology (its even in dictionaries now)
So two things.. firstly, at 11:24, getting to the bottom of "buck naked" is always a noble quest, and second, this was the first ever time I didn't skip a NordVPN segment.
My mother was a teacher so I learned about malapropisms and spoonerisms long before they mentioned things like them at school. She would use them deliberately.
My favourite when she learned I can do many things as well with my left hand as my right - she told everyone I am amphibious!
That’s hilarious. My dad would do the same things when I was a kid. He’d say “obstacle delusion” instead of optical illusion. I’m pretty sure that one and others were on purpose. But he is dyslexic so Kimbles and Bits instead of Kibbles and Bits might be how he read it literally. Lol
My dad and husband did the same. Now, I do! But, sadly, with each passing year, fewer people are educated enough to get a laugh 🥺
Instead of "foregone conclusion", my dad says "foreskin contusion"
@@ForestFire369 This one made me cringe and laugh at the same time!
For me, I do some things strictly left handed, some things strictly right handed, and somethings with either hand - I call myself as ambiguous.
My mom moved from France, she was familiar with the expression, "Penny for your thoughts," so when she heard, "I don't give a damn", she mistook it as, "I don't give a dime." It took her years to realize the mistake, but I must admit I like the "dime" version more.
I hope you gave her your two cents worth when explaining it to her! 😊
I could see someone intentionally saying "I don't give a dime" to avoid saying a "swear word".
@@cydkriletich6538Because people put their two cents in, but it’s only a penny for your thoughts, I’ve always wondered who is making that one cent of profit.
That works! 😊
Was this prefaced with "Frankly, my dear"? ;-)
I have a friend who insists that to withhold strategic information is to not "tip your hat". I've explained that the phrase is "Don't tip your hand" - as in "don't let anyone see your cards" in Poker - but she is positive that tipping your hat means to give away a secret. Of course, if you're hiding a large bald spot beneath your hat, she's absolutely correct.
LOL< since I only heard it used a few times (and yes too many people seem to be saying "tipping hats"), I started wondering if it was about saluting the wrong people?
(You know: to pay respect to a person of higher rank by touching the headgear/ because of course that comes form the way older tradition of taking off your hat or cap entirely.)
I've heard both. Tip my hat I've heard as "I tip my hat to you". Tipping ones hat is a show of acknowledgement. In my rural community it is as common as a wave or even a nod as we pass one another on the road. The tip your hand referring to not share information as you used it. I tip my hat to you for sharing!
The phrase I usually hear is, "Don't show your hand."
@@bsteven885 don't show your hat
If she doesn't want to tip her hand, she should keep her cards close to the chest and not show her ace in the hold.
Spent my entire childhood internally hearing "play it by year" instead of "by ear" and realized at some point as an adult that the latter obviously made more sense.
I came to the comments looking for this one!
The eggcorn that gets my goat is when people write (you can't tell when spoken), "That peaked my interest.".
Yeah I think that totally counts!
Good one!
Brilliant ...that one gets me too
why what should it be ?
@@Sam_Green____4114 I think it should be piqued instead of peaked
I liked when a co-worker complained of a shop's "exhuberant prices." It got her point across very well.
That one might be pretty common! I'm not sure if it's an eggcorn as it seems intentional when I've heard it used, though. Can deliberate eggcorns be used for puns and slang?@@MyPronounIsGoddess
Probably the most effective use of an ad in a TH-cam video, forcing watchers to actually watch the full ad and not skip ahead. Definitely deserves a like 👍
I skipped it.
@VincentFastFingers I also skipped it. Thanks, sponserblock!
I skipped it lol
I enjoyed it
It was clever and kind of fun!
Artificial intelligence would probably not be able to produce this type of natural mistake or even understand it, which is what makes human language so beautiful!
I love language! My daughter was working retail years ago and a customer asked where the “fox fur” throws were. She told the customer that they didn’t carry anything like that. The customer insisted that the store had them at Christmas time - some looked like mink, some looked like leopard…. The woman was asking for “faux fur” throws. She told me about this later, and ever since we’ve used the word “fox” for anything fake and still laugh about it.
You should augment your fox fur with kitten caboodle
I flip it around, and refer often to "Faux News".
@@robogeek7842
Kit & caboodle. .
Years ago at work my coworkers and I got a hearty laugh over an ad that came in the mail for "Genuine faux pearls!" We started making up the backstory for them: they were found by natives of the Faux Islands, etc. We referred back to the Faux Islands for months. 😂
A lot of youtubes say down the pipe lol
“For all intensive purposes” is a personal favourite
I like to slip in for all infant porpoises sometimes to see if people notice.
This drives me crazy! I swear I hear it more often than the correct phrase.
@@johnmoore8067😂 this one kinda drives me nuts too
All in tents and porpoises, as well.
I thought it was intensive purposes for a long time too.
I also thought people were saying don't take things or granite, as in sturdy like bedrock. Imagine my disappointment when I learned it was granted as in guaranteed.
In Danish we have the expression "Den tid, den sorg" which translates to "That time. that grief" basically meaning "We'll worry about that later, when it's relevant". The eggcorn of that is "Den tid den sover" translating to "That time is sleeping". It is very common.
Excellent
@@RobWords eggcellent*
"Den tid den sover"... Det synes jeg aldrig jeg har hørt... Meget interessant
Heller ikke mig
13:42 a squib is still commonly used in practical special effects for TV and film. Predominantly when filming action scenes where characters get shot, they visually show the "bullet (or whatever) hitting the character. And yes, there is a digital version still named the same.
Not 100% sure which classification this counts as, but as a kid I thought that the phrase "so sue me" was actually one word "sosumi" that was just like a borrowed japanese word that meant something like "there's nothing to be done about it now" kinda like how one would use the phrase "c'est la vie". Went around saying this to adults when chided for things not knowing how flippant I was coming off.
not a native speaker, and for the longest of times I thought that the phrase "Suit yourself" was "Sue it yourself" as in, "Make your own judgement as to what you're missing out on here"
Dude, that is hilarious
Amber Lamps was used in an old TH-cam video. I still yell it when an ambulance drives by me
@@AlphamagnusCreations😂😂😂 amber lamps! 🎉
There's actually a sound file named sosumi, for the exact same reason you logically defaulted to that ... if you put it into wikipedia you should find the article on it.
I read once about someone mishearing the phrase "it cost an arm and a leg" as "it cost a nominal egg", due to the NY (?) accent. I like both phrases.
😂😂😂
Another commentator sai they read it in Reader's digest
One of my daughters once told me they had studied "ultra-violent light" in science class. She repeated it twice during the conversation, and then I screamed and tried to ward off the deathly blows of the sun. We both had a good laugh.
Since uv light can cause skin cancer Ulta violent might be a better name
Seems to me that I saw that movie.
CF Alex in A Clockwork Orange, an his pursuit of "ultra violence"
me glazzies! 🔥
Wait until she learns about infra-dead
For years I heard and said “play it by year” explaining it to myself as something we aren’t going to fix now but let it grow on its own over time as it will. I was blown away when I learned it was “play it by ear” which made sense as well and better 😂
As profesional musicians we will sometimes come to a gig unprepared with sheet music and we will play by 👂
Sorry if this one has already been mentioned, but my favorite eggcorn was unknowingly exposed by the comedian Sean Jordan when he stated on a podcast that one should "throw that cosh right into the wind". Pretty funny reaction when his cohosts went from complete confusion to realizing that he had spent his entire life thinking that risk takers were "throwing cosh into the wind".
That's delicious! Thanks for that story.
hello fellow namenheimer
They do sort of mean the same thing.
I would have to hear him say it, but are you sure this wasn't an intentional mis-speak? Like, when the kids say "rizz" as short for charisma? Adding "that" can make you sound folksy. "Throw that cosh to the wind, my dawg."
@@danielmartin2000
hello fellow namenheimer
< Translate to English >
hello fellownamenheimer
< See original (Translated by Google) >
Say whaaat?
When my son was very young, he used to talk about people living in “compartment buildings”. We still use that term today!! 😂
Our kids called the car storage “ The glove department”
One I remember using as a child was "a pigment of my imagination." Given my ability to visualize in great detail with fine color differentiations and the fact that painting is a way of creating worlds where there was blankness before, it made perfect sense that people used the word for coloring agents to discuss imagination. Whereas I knew what a fig was and what a mint was, but had never heard the word "figment" outside of the phrase about imagination, so it wasn't until a few adults were condescendingly laughing about my use of "pigment" without explaining what the word was that I realized I'd been saying it wrong.
I'm pretty sure I've used "a fragment of my imagination" when trying to remember "figment". 😅
hah! this reminds me of when I thought "pain in the neck" was "paint in the neck".
Not a very funny mistake, except that I have vivid memories of just staring at these paint cans in my house, just pondering over the expression for long periods of time. I knew what it meant, just couldn't figure out what the hell paint had to do with it.
This went on for years! I don't think it counts as an eggcorn, though.
Those kinds of experiences - adults laughing w/o explaining to the kid - were just shy of traumatic for me as a kid. As an adult, I can understand what was going on, but as a child, it was just people laughing at me, which I read as disapproval. Maybe I was just over-sensitive as a kid.
@@elainebelzDetroit Oh, it was definitely traumatic for me. the message I got was worth laughing at, but not worth teaching the phrase that wouldn't set me up to be teased or discounted later. They probably thought I was over-sensitive, by which they meant I was choosing not to deal with my emotions. The truth was that I was an undiagnosed autistic, my nervous system is LITERALLY more sensitive than most. I was dealing with my emotions the best I could, but no one had thought to teach me how to manage social rejection that registered as literal physical pain.
I have decided that most of society is actually under-sensitive, and they deal with that deficit by berating those who pick up on the trends and details and subtleties they miss.
purple really is a pigment of the imagination - it does not exist as a monochromatic colour
If anyone questions my autism I'll just remind them that I love this sort of content
My dad, who had been raised in the American Midwest by Southern parents, once asked my mother (who was raised in California) if she would cook him some arsh potatoes as a side dish for dinner. Mom puzzled over this for a full 10 minutes, then finally turned to my dad and said, "Do you mean Irish potatoes?" Dad had adopted his parents' pronunciation of the dish without realizing what it was they were saying.
Up until the end of the story, I thought it would be because of your German ancestry. Arsch (pronounced somewhat like arsh) literally means arse in German.
@@Dicska That's it! I'll call them Arschkartoffeln from now on!
I thought it was going to be a weird way to say 'mashed'!
Thinl you just made sense of the English dish potato hash for me.
Hahaha yes, I am from the South and my dad always said "arshtaters" 😂
“if worse comes to worst” is meant to mean if a bad situation becomes a dire situation but almost everyone I know says “if worse comes to worse” … which basically is saying if the situation remains unchanged
Actually, the correct idiom is "if worst comes to worst," i.e., the worst situation arises. So people have been getting it wrong for a long time.
@@weirdofromhalo Came to this video to find this exact reply to this exact comment. Haha, just kidding, it was completely axe a dental.
I've seen a whole lot of people lately just confusing the words "worse" and "worst" in general
“Worst” does not mean “more bad than worse”. Worse is the comparative and is only for 2 things. Worst is the superlative and is only for 3 or more. It’s a fallacy to think “oh man, it was worse already and now it’s worst”
Correct usage: Chevy is worse than Ford. Pontiac is the worst of all.
Worse comes to worse could just mean a bad situation that got worse.
You are the first TH-camr to actually induce me to sit through their sponsorship slot and listen to the pitch without skipping ahead. That was very clever. Well played!
It was still bloody NordVPN though. So sick of hearing about them! Aren't there any other sponsors?
@@smike9884 They're one of the highest yield YT sponsors out there from what I've heard.
For years I’ve alway thought we were “making ends meat” when my wife corrected me that it’s actually “making ends meet” referring to a tailor rather than beef trimmings.
The phrase 'Old Timer's Disease' was always used - by the folks I knew - as a light hearted variant (usually when teasing someone) to avoid talking about an actual disease. I imagine a few of these started out as fun wordplay.
When I was 5, I got in a lot of trouble for this one, because I was "being rude."
Yes, I have heard it just as a joking reference to the kinds of things us old folks regularly experience, not the actual disease. I’m reminded of the lady whose pastor asked if she ever thought about the hereafter. “Yes,” she said, “every day. I’ll come into a room and wonder, ‘what did I come in here after.’”
If you like long enough, you can relate to that.
I imagine you are right, wordplay is pretty common and people are very prone to using phrases they don't fully understand.
...Actually, this has a much more sinister relative now that I consider it, it's related to how presenting ironic opinions inevitably leads to dumb people not realizing you were being ironic and gradually attracting people who earnestly believe it. Think flat eartherism. In the history of the modern movement, which started in the 50s IIRC, it was obviously extremely fringe but there were a decent amount of people who embraced it ironically because it was so silly. It wasn't until the 2000s and the explosion of social media and youtube that we started seeing increasing numbers of people ACTUALLY believing that nonsense. Another example would be how the reddit subreddit "The Donald" was originally a joke subreddit because Trump was such a joke candidate and yet, for anyone who has the misfortune of interacting with American politics, we all know how that spiraled out of control eventually.
It's a shame, because being ironic is a type of humor I appreciate and feel drawn to, but it needs to be used responsibly. Luckily, wordplay is much lower stakes and we can just laugh a little at people who are unfortunately fooled into sounding a little silly without any problems.
@@steve-4045My Grandma is always going on about her mean friend Arthur. Arthur Ritus
This portion of the video reminded me of a potential Japanese candidate: aruchūhaimzu (アル中ハイマズ), a decades‐old coining for drinking oneself blotto. The starting point was アル中, a typically Japanese shortening of arukōru chūdoku (アルコール中毒, literally "alcohol addiction.")
I had to write "potential candidate" because my Japanese drinking buddies used it more or less deliberately to equate drunken stupor with the "brain frog" of Alzheimer's.
BTW, decades ago, the term in vogue was chihoshō (地保証, dementia), but the katakana version of アルツハイマー has long taken over.
I have an example of an eggcorn from Italian. The phrase "d'alto bordo" means "high-class" or "high-profile". Its literal translation is "from the high side (of the ship)". The idea is that the higher your cabin was on the ship, the higher your prestige. However, because of the obscureness and historical distance of the expression, people often mistakenly say "d'alto borgo" instead, meaning "from a high(-class) borough/village".
That’s really interesting. Love this kind of insight
I was absolutely positive that you wouldn't find an eggcorn that I've been using, as you boldly stated you would, since I've been obsessed with them for many a year. But by god, you got me. 'To the manner born'. I had no idea. Well done!
I wonder if there might be any editions of Shakespeare out there that have it wrong, because of some editor's assumption.
Grew up watching To the Major Born so never realised the phrase was to the manner born. 😆
Same, also because of that programme.
Isn't it actually " to the manner borne"?
Asking for a friend.
"Manner born"... that was the only one he listed that I've always gotten wrong.
Also, I'd never even heard "wet squib" before.
One pet peeve I’ve always had is when people say “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less”. It’s such a minor thing but it just pisses me off so much 😂
A friend of mine was diagnosed with "prostrate" cancer but he stood up and it went away.
My favorite- that was not really wrong, it just looked funny on the sign- was a local State Farm insurance agent's business here in San Diego called "Pro State Farm"... just cracked me up that there was a farm for prostates...
@@tjchad1Let angels prostate fall...
here's an eggcorn in norwegian that i like! it's the phrase "å få jernteppe", which means to momentarily forget something you know or something you were about to say, like when you're doing a test in school and you _know_ you know the answer to this question but it just evaporated from your memory. in english, the phrase literally means "to get an iron curtain" (same origin as the metaphor used about the cold war!) and the common eggcorn is "å få hjerneteppe", literally "to get a brain curtain"
That’s brilliant!.. how do you pronounce the two?
@@tom_4615 you can input the words into google translate and hear the norwegian text-to-speech voice say them. they're identical besides the eggcorn's extra "e" in the middle
A perfect eggcorn.
I use the "correct" form of most of these phrases (the butt/buck naked controversy aside) because I read a lot and have seen them spelled out. I project that eggcorns will spread eggsponentially as our culture moves from word-based to audio and video.
I think my antisocial youth spent in libraries served me well on this video.
I agree that reading really educates one away from eggcorns, at least in the last 200 years since spelling was standardized.
Reading helps two ways- seeing a phrase spelled out correctly defines it, and a wider knowledge of the world explains orgins of phrases.
One has to read good source material. Social media is very active as text also; witness this forum interaction. Additionally, teenagers absorbing language & grammar from tweets are seeing many erroneous examples of language usage.
@@donjones4719 I think when someone claims that they "read a lot" they are not referring to social media, twitter, etc - but rather published books
Similar - I also solve cryptic crosswords where wordplay may reference 'sounds like' or homonyms, which remind me of the write one to right down as the answer.
My mom has a degree in english so even though we have no money, I’ve never had to worry about getting these phrases wrong
One I found myself using for years is "kitten kaboodle", which seemed delightful but was, in reality, "kit and kaboodle", a type of sewing kit. I'm let down that kittens are not somehow at the center of it.
Woah I didn’t know this one, that’s cool to know
Til
There is a German phrase with the same meaning: „mit Kind und Kobold“ … which looks a great deal like "kit and kaboodle."
The German phrase translated literally to "with kid and helper-house-spirit." A „Kobold“ was something like the Scandinavian nisse: helpful hidden-folk that would do little tasks if you were good to them and Followed the Rule [of the supernatural], but would play pranks on you if you were unkind to them.
So to leave „mit Kind und Kobold“ meant that you were not only taking everything _and_ the kitchen sink, you were clearing out with the non-physical members of the house too!
Well if you need a phrase for mad I have a cat one for you "shitting kittens"(Man Tom is going to be shitting kittens when he finds out.) I dont think it came from anywhere else. But its also funny 😂😂😂😂. And while its not got cat in the phrase it- "Bitter shitbox"(Karen is such a bitter shitbox" kinda implies a litterbox in my mind. Ive been using both for years.
Aww... Just knit one ..
Words that are misheard and therefore mistranslated: 1: When first seeing a Ferris wheel he/she thought they said "Paris wheel" and therefore it is now called a "Parisienne wheel" (Pariserhjul) in Swedish. 2: The most (in-)famous mistake must be the Grimm Brothers tale of Cinderella when translating if from French. The slipper was made of squirrel pelt/fur (vaire?) and not verre (glass). That mistake is still very much alive and kicking. Greetings from Sweden 🇸🇪.
Squirrel Pelt would be a lot softer on your foot then I glass slipper...... squirrel Pelt
🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
I heard an alternate theory that it was supposed to be a "grass" slipper, but that doesn't make any sense in the context of French. Vaire/verre, that makes much more sense.
Squirrel fur from the soft underbelly is called faire.
How about "Vår fru dagen" becoming "våffeldagen"? We even eat waffles on that day. (For non-Swedes. Vår fru dagen means "Our Lady Day" literally and is the Swedish name for the Feast of the Annunciation. It sounds close to "våffeldagen" which means "waffle day".)
I once had a student email me and ask for the copy of the rule brick for an assignment. I thought it was a clever eggcorn for rubric - a rubric does sort of have the rules for an assignment and sometimes the chart format is brick shaped. I think a lot of eggcorns happen because people speak more than they read, especially casual speech that is more idiomatic.
This makes sense especially because i read a LOT as a kid and recognized all the eggcorns in the video except for damp squib (maybe a dialect thing? I'm very American) as incorrect.
@@rubynkitchen8730Same here, I never heard or saw that phrase before, but I recognized everything else
😂rule brick… that’s hilarious
I had a wee woman at work who continually dropped malapropisms and eggcorns throughout the day.
My favourite one was when someone was rushing a job. Instead of "patience is a virtue" she always said "patience is a virgin" - this from a woman with eight children too!
I grew up with furniture made of iron rods welded together. For years, I thought it was called 'rod iron' furniture; 'wrought iron' made sense when I ran across it, but 'rod iron' fit my experience just fine.
In most cases, "wrought iron" is actually steel. Iron is an element, and steel is made
mostly of iron. But things that are made (for all purposes) of just iron are very, very
rare. Even cast iron has a lot of carbon mixed with the iron. More carbon, even, than
steel would have. Long story, I know.
My youngest daughter had a couple of fantastic egg corns as a toddler. She used to think the British DIY store B and Q was called "be in a queue", she wasn't wrong! She also thought Coleslaw was called Cold Slop, not her favourite food.
My boys had a similar "eggcorn". Toys-R-Us became Toys-for-Us.
Cold slop isn't far off either. An etymology I read said it either meant cabbage salad or cold salad.
My daughter was convinced that a cellphone was actually a sell-a-phone. Her logic seemed to be that at the mall there were many kiosk stores that sell cellphones but they never sell landline phones.
Cold Saw/Sore is another term I've chanced upon.
Kinda weird, someone asking if I want some cold saw at the BBQ.
Nah mate, I'm good, keep your herpes, got my own issues to deal with without adding more to the pile 😂
At the start of every month, my daughter would say, "A pinch and a punch, for the first day of the munch". (instead of month)
She thought wedding ceremonies said , "Do you take *Ladys Name* for your awfully wetted wife?". (instead of Lawfully wedded wife) And
When you listen to a conversation that you're not privy to, known as "Eaves drop', she called it "Ears drop". So cute.
The effort you put into writing this episode deserves the highest accommodations.
Gravel!
😂
I up laud your own efforts!
Here's an eggcorn I heard many years ago on RTE: Many non-Irish speakers were alleged to mumble their way through the national anthem at a sporting event, and finish by boldly singing "Shovin' Annie around the green" for the last line, which in Irish is "Seo libh canaig amhrán na bhfiann" (We'll sing a Soldier's Song) - probably not an eggcorn, but one of the other phenomena discussed in your excellent video.
I didn't find any egg corns that I use, but I think I'll start using one. I love the "French Benefits," It sounds risque and exotic.
"Card shark" is one that comes to mind for me. "Card sharp" is the original phrase with "sharp" meaning somebody that is good at playing cards. But "card shark" makes perfect sense and drives home the point of the meaning of the phrase even better than the original.
I never knew that one. Card shark is fully ingrained in society now, along with pool shark.
@@MacNerfer and baby shark
That has literally been translated to Swedish as "korthaj" meaning just "card shark" and we have no other word for it as far as i know.
@@MacNerfer so much so that we call (in poker anyway) bad gamblers Fish, big gamblers with lots of money are whales. My favourite saying when there are fish about is "don't tap the glass" i.e. don't give the bad players too much advice, you might wake up the fish
There was also a game show in the 70's called "Card Shark"
Great video. The one's I've been using incorrect for years are "free reign" and "just desserts",
And your ad read in this one was a work of genius.
“I mean, what is a squib?”
Exactly. While some eggcorns (e.g. “Post-dramatic stress disorder”) may arguably by “wrong”, others of the “wet your appetite” type are arguably _corrections to outdated language_ rather than mistakes. Often the power of the idiom keeps a word like “deserts” in “just deserts” beyond its shelf life, and the record eggcorn represents a useful re-analysis that actually makes the old phrase more relevant to its current users.
Chomping at the bit. I think we can all just use that one now.
I have 2 meanings for Squib for you.
1) In firearms shooting, a Squib load is a cartridge that malfunctions when fired, by having an insufficient gunpowder to propel the bullet clear of the barrel, creating a dangerous situation where the fired bullet is now an obstruction in the barrel and should the shooter fire a subsequent round, could cause catastrophic damage and injury from the detonation of the firearm. The word Squib is partially in reference to the "squeak" noise sometimes heard from the firing remaining contained inside the barrel of the firearm, instead of the bang.
2) In popular culture in the Harry Potter movies, a Squib is a non-magical person born to 2 magical parents, (in the films/ books are the characters Arabella Figg ( who watches over Harry near his Aunt's home) , and Argus Filch , the Hogwart's school caretaker.
Interesting, @@scottcrawford3745! The usage I was aware of before this video was in Hollywood special effects, where a squib is very small explosive used, for example, to burst a packet of fake blood to simulate an injury.
@@bumpty9830 That is correct, and I completely forgot that one. Nice catch!!
A favorite of mine that I just found out my 57 year old husband has said all his life, "Finders keepers, losers sweepers." He said, "yeah, finders get to keep, but losers have to sweep up the floor look for what they lost". I stammered, "yeah but, but...but... nevermind...that makes too much sense".
It's forced, but it makes a kind of desperate scrambling-for-it's-life kind of sense.
🤣🤣🤣
The original definitely makes way more sense.
🤣😂 My otherwise VERY intelligent, Bachelors degree’d and vice President of sales and marketing husband asked me the other day at dinner if “ends meat” is keto. I said “what the hell is that.” He said that his mom would never make it but talked about it all the time when he was little. After a lot of back and forth I couldn’t believe what it boiled down to. I thought he was playing me but he very much thought “making ends meet” was some succulent dish that they couldn’t afford. I couldn’t believe my ears, that he’d not heard that phrase as an adult and put it together. Now I tell this story to his friends and colleagues every chance I get 🤣😂
@@scrumps101 haha! Thanks for telling that story. I enjoyed hearing about it! Goes to show that no matter how intelligent or educated we are, sometimes there are simply glitches in our brains sometimes when it comes to the "perception" of what we hear, and how our brains try to make sense of it. Loved your story. Tfs
Squib is STILL used quite regularly to describe small explosives in contexts of special effects, airbag inflators, and demolition wherein they trigger a larger device or simply simulate a bullet strike in your favorite action film.
Great fun Rob
And in the Harry Potter stories it's used to describe a non-magical person born to magical parents.
Squib is also the term used to describe a misfire of a bullet from a gun where the round goes off but there is not enough force from the gunpowder to push the projectile all the way down the barrel. It's actually quite dangerous if you don't catch it and chamber another round, but I digress..
In the military, I was an Aviation Ordinance Tech, and a squib was, much like you are describing, a small explosive cap used to ignite a much larger device/explosion.
Having these as my examples in my life experience, I have always understood squib to literally mean a small explosion or explosive device. I never thought to look that one up to see if it was accurate lol
@@jonbird6566yep!
I don't know where this falls but I work in pest control in Texas and there are a lot of little geckos. The insurance commercials for Geico with the gecko have confused a lot of people who now complain about all the giecos they have around the house 😂
😂🤣
Yeah, and I bet they are ANOLES, not geckos
😂😂😂😂😂
Geicos?
😂😂😂😂😂
When cycling back from school, I need to ride uphill for a while through the edge of the forest to avoid the centre of the village and so I am left alone with my thoughts for a while and often come up with various stories and ideas on the way, so I decided to nickname it: Ponder Lane or Wander Road, the latter because you wander and roam over it and “wander” (as I thought it was called because you rove around in your thoughts) in your mind. I told my father when I got home about half an hour ago, and he asked me whether I meant “wander” or “wonder”, I said wander because I thought wonder was only for miracles and the sort, I was wrong and now I can’t choose whether to call it “Wander Road” or “Wonder Road” so for now it will only be “Ponder Lane”.
There's a really good example of an eggcorn that is probably so old and commonly used, that the original version is all but forgotten:
Parting shot, originally, is Parthian shot: named after the mounted Partian archers and their ability to turn around in their saddles and release an accurate arrow shot while retreating.
❤❤❤❤❤
I never heard of the original until today.
And I assume a horde of mounted Partian Archers had something to do with mounting something or someone at a party?
@@johnle6982 Not really. The Parthians were an empire that existed alongside the Romans, and were considered in many ways their arch nemesis as the Romans were never able to defeat them and suffered some horrific defeats trying (look for Historia Civilis' video about the battle of Carrhae for a chilling example). They weren't some wild horde, but a very ancient, well established state by the time the Romans came along.
@@johnle6982 I'm going with, that's the Mountain I will die on.😁
My wife loves these. “Ride home about it” is my personal favorite of hers. She claims it makes sense because of the Pony Express.
Ha ha “nothing to ride home about”
Growing up in the country side and riding horses, I’m surprised that I didn’t believe this also. Too funny.
Thanks for sharing this 🤣
If it was nothing to ride home about, and it was completely fake, would it have been on the phony express? 😁
I couldn’t bring myself to correct a friend who kept saying, repeatedly, she was going to mail something in a vanilla envelope.
Oh, that's a good one!
Oh yes that one drives me wild!
It's yellow-brown, like it was stained with vanilla.
It only makes sense; they're usually cheaper than the chocolate ones, after all.
You’re a better person than I am. I make sure people know the truth🤣🤣