" Olive, the other reindeer"; was Re: "Trolling" for "Trawling": An Eggcorn?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Aug 3 02:19:19 UTC 2007


At 1:02 AM +0000 8/3/07, ronbutters at AOL.COM wrote:
>Dennis,
>Whilst thou art mindful of "preserv[ing] such treasures of the
>tongue" as that which distinguisheth cot & caught, why neglect "lie"
>versus "lay"?
>
>Or DID you really mean that those shepherds were laying their sheep?
>Yr friend,
>Coco

Well, there's that line from the Messiah in which the singer admits
"For we like sheep"

--pretty suspicious, I always thought.

LH

>Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Dennis Preston <preston at MSU.EDU>
>
>Date:         Thu, 2 Aug 2007 19:32:14
>To:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject:      Re: [ADS-L] " Olive,
>               the other reindeer"; was Re: "Trolling" for "Trawling": An
>               Eggcorn?
>
>
>Once years ago I stood in front of  a used car lot in Calgary
>wondering why Otto's Auto's struck me as mildly funny; then I
>realized that for almost ahl Canadians they are homophones. (And
>nearly everybody west of the Mississippi, nearly everybody in New
>England, and a passle of folk in a band through the middle of the US.)
>
>dInIs, who preserves such treasures of the tongue, by virtue of age and region
>

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