I say “waxing elephants” on purpose.
My mother used to tell me in all seriousness that someone had old-timers. I still don’t know if she was just mispronouncing Alzheimers.
So is “Let’s go Brandon” an eggcorn?
Not to excuse ignorance, but the “alz” within “Alzheimer” does mean old. (The “heim” means “home”; so an etymologically aware individual might call it “Old Home’s disease” without being completely wrong.)
I say “For all intensive porpoises” on purpose. Or would that be “on porpoise”?
“Co-inky-dink” for coincidence is another one that comes to mind.
OHGAWD, I hate “coinky-dink!”
I’m damn near completely deaf, and I rely on TV captioning. Typically, news shows use voice recognition software, and the captions I see often have nothing to do with what’s going on. Many times I end up laughing my butt off during serious news stories. I think reference to “sperm blankets” in a story about a major accident with fatalities was the last great bit of captioning nonsense.
~VOW
Which segues nicely into what drove me to this thread. Last night we were watching some “old time TV” on ROKU. Specifically, one of the earliest episodes of 1950’s Dragnet. With subtitles because I’m nearly deaf.
Cue the opening Horns “Dragnet Theme” Then the opening scene establishing view of Los Angeles. Then, Jack Webb’s voice says (according to the subtitles)…
“This is the setting. Los Angeles California.”
Aargh! and so forth. Made me feel as old as I am.
For you younger folks, the famous line is “This is the city…”
There is a thread in this forum titled `A story about Tracy and I’.
I used to work with the Queen of Eggcorns, and they all seemed to be medical diagnoses.
She had “arthur-itis”, her neighbor had “Lucas” (lupus), and her oft-spoken of nephew was “artistic”.
mmm
Oh, I know the type! And women always discuss their husbands’ prostrate problems!
~VOW
Nah, that’s just a mixed metaphor. A malapropism is swapping one word for a near-homophone, usually with a comic result. “He went out in the swamp, and was eaten by an allegory,” for example. It’s basically the same thing as an eggcorn, although I think eggcorns are specifically malapropisms that largely maintain the original intent: “old-timers” for “Alzheimers,” as opposed to “allegory” for “alligator.”
Was it Chester A. Arthur-itis?
I’m sometimes under the alcafluence of incaohol. In fact…
A friend cannot seem to say, “Covid.” It comes out “Corvid.” I always want to ask him if he’s referring to a crow.
Ugh, I saw that! I couldn’t even bring myself to read it.
and here i thought you were talking about the english spoken in my country
Probably for the best. It gets even more squicky from there.
I was on tenderhooks with baited breath reading this thread, but had to mark it with an asteriks pro term. It might be shellfish of me as an ex-patriot, but there was a chester drawers to clean out.
I’m putting this on my big list of Things I Shoulda Known about … not like there aren’t plenty of Malaysian people at the Uni generally…