Newsletter – Riddles, Featured Authors and more! – July 5, 2024

Have you heard the term eggcorns? Yes. You read that correctly. Eggcorns. It’s the perfect name for this thing that happens when we mishear a word and wrongly assume that one thing was said when it was actually something else entirely.

When someone heard the word acorn, they wrongly assumed that those little things were called eggcorns. It sounds very similar, and one could justify that an acorn is similar to an egg. It’s plausible.

It happens all the time, doesn’t it?

When I was a little girl, I had a calendar on my wall where I’d written the word “extrasizes.” My dad asked about it. He shared with me that the actual term was exercises to which I replied, “Oh. I thought it was extrasizes because that’s what people do when they want to remove “extra sizes.” That was, perhaps, my first eggcorn.

The thing is, we probably have eggcorns that we don’t even know are eggcorns!

Here are fifteen examples:

1. For all intensive purposes . . . is actually . . . For all intents and purposes.
2. Nip it in the butt . . . is actually . . . Nip it in the bud.
3. Oldtimers disease . . . is actually . . . Alzheimer’s disease.
4. A mute point . . . is actually . . . a moot point.
5. All for not . . . is actually . . . all for naught.
6. An old wise tale . . . is actually . . . an old wives’ tale.
7. A safety deposit box . . . is actually . . . a safe deposit box.
8. A rot iron fence . . . is actually . . . a wrought iron fence.
9. Chomping at the bit . . . is actually . . . champing at the bit. (That’s one of mine!)
10. A deep seated issue. . . is actually . . . a deep seeded issue.
11. Towing the line . . . is actually . . . toeing the line.
12. Peak your interest . . . is actually . . . pique your interest.
13. Wet your appetite . . . is actually . . . whet your appetite.
14. Throws of passion . . . is actually . . . throes of passion.
15. Lip singing . . . is actually . . . lip synching.

If you don’t mix many of these up, you are probably a reader. It’s hard to know what folks are saying when you cannot see the words in print. I often marvel when I notice, for the first time, the spellings of words. I can recall a time—just a couple years ago—when I realized there are two words that sound like this: /eek/.
• She saw the mouse and screamed, “Eek!”
• This one sounds the same but is spelled differently: eke
• To eke is to squeeze every bit out of something (such as a vacation) or to make something last. For example, I eke every last bit of toothpaste from my toothpaste tube.

The point is not to feel dumb when we make errors or to make others feel small when they make errors. Rather it’s fun to notice just how magnificent (and sometimes complex) our language can be. And, certainly, we all deserve grace when navigating this language of ours.

Scholars agree that the invention of the process for recording words began only about 5,500 years ago. Now that’s incredible!