Another day, another batch:
When my daughter was four, I asked her to go get me a beer (as it happens, a Budweiser) from the refrigerator. She was happy to make her dad happy and when she returned she said, “Here’s your buzzwater, Dad.”
Another tosses in a mondegreen:
For years, my favorite beer advertisement on the radio was a heavy metal tune with lyrics that went “AMSTEL LIIIIIIGHT, Enter night! Off to never never land!” I was too young to drink beer, and evidently too sheltered to have heard of Metallica.
From a reader with a Mozambique-born wife:
Her favorite tea is Early Grey.
Many more eggcorns below:
In my first real journalism job, my first big assignment was a feature on the head of an investment fund. He’s a very smart guy surrounded by a very smart team. I interviewed a partner in the firm for some background and, in my draft, quoted the partner using the phrase “a sort of Damocles.”
Fortunately, my editor asked me if that’s what he actually said. It was, I insisted. I went back and listened to the recording of our conversation multiple times, and that’s what I heard him say. Then I thought, “I don’t actually know what a ‘Damocles’ is.” So I did a little research and learned about Cicero and the Sword of Damocles and figured out quickly that I had a long way to go if I wanted to be any good at my job.
Another:
One of our ER psychiatrists referred in a note yesterday to the “Bloods and Crypts.”
Another:
I grew up in a small town, the kind where the newspaper would report on anything and everything that was happening if it was even mildly interesting. Sometime around my senior year of high school, the newspaper editor/reporter retired and was replaced by someone much younger. One of the first stories that the new editor ran was a story about the new tow truck that one of the two service stations in town had purchased. The new tow truck had a 15,000 pound winch on the back of it. Unfortunately, the newspaper article instead stated that the truck had a 15,000 pound wench in the back.
It’s unclear whether this ultimately helped or hurt the tow truck owner’s business.
Heh. Another:
When I was student-teaching, I taught To Kill a Mockingbird to a 10th grade class, and somehow we got onto the subject of ghosts (that was 20 years ago, but most likely we were referencing Atticus Finch’s remark that “there were other ways of making people into ghosts”). A female student then made a comment and used the idiom “the ghost is clear.” Everyone looked at her, puzzled. “You mean, the coast is clear,” I said. “No,” she responded, “that’s not the saying – ghosts are clear, aren’t they?”
Dina would appreciate this one:
When my son was four, we took a month-long camping trip following the Lewis and Clark Trail from our home in North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean. At one point we told my son that at the end of the trip we were going to Seattle. He got this really puzzled look on his face, and asked, “Who’s Attle, and why are we going to see her?”
Another of sorts:
I was holding back on sending this because it’s more related to an accent than an actual “eggcorn”, but somebody in the thread brought up the Boston accent and I couldn’t resist. In graduate school I worked in the produce department of the Cambridge, Massachusetts Bread & Circus Market (eventually purchased by Whole Foods). I was relatively new and sometimes overwhelmed at the bizarre array of produce that was for sale.
One day a call comes in and I take the phone. Caller: “Do you carry staff root?”
Me (after checking the display): “No, sir. We have celery root, burdock root, taro root and ginger root. We don’t have any staff root.”
Caller: “No, no, no. Fruit shaped like a sta!”
He was, of course, a Bostonian looking for ‘star fruit’.
One more:
I’m always sorry I didn’t save this clipping from our local newspaper … but the cut line under a picture of local school children dancing in a circle holding ribbons tied to a pole said: “Children Demonstrating the Maple Dance.” Makes me laugh to think of the circumstances of the likely over-the-phone interview between a young journalist and a grade school teacher, “Yeah, can you send me photo of the kid’s dancing? What’s it called again?”
Lovely thread. It probably should be recategorized into Mental Health Breaks.
The Dish 