Foot, or hoof, and mouth

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:35 AM -0400 5/12/05, Damien Hall wrote:
>Bethany Dumas wrote:
>
>Spotted on a calendar at my dentist's office this a.m.:
>
>"I think you have foot and mouth disease." (patient in chair is seeing an
>x-ray of a foot)
>
>Two eggcorns?
>
>Foot in mouth?
>
>Hoof and mouth?
>
>========================
>
>In the UK, the disease that I think is known in the US as 'hoof-and-mouth' is
>only ever 'foot-and-mouth'.  I found it quite strange when I first arrived in
>the States, and the foot-and-mouth epidemic at home was still in the news, to
>hear it referred to as 'hoof-and-mouth'.
>
>That might reduce the eggcorn count on your dentist's calendar to
>one - might it
>have been a British calendar?
>
>Damien Hall
>University of Pennsylvania

I actually have "foot-and-mouth disease" > "foot-in-mouth disease"
among my list of "X at n Y" eggcorns (or, as I call them there,
reinterpretations) in my "Spitten Image" paper (AS 2003), but allow
that (unlike a number of other cases moving in one direction or
another among "X 'n' Y", "Xin' Y", "Xen Y", et al., from "clean
shavin" to "black and red fish", from "beckon call" to "in this day
in age", as we've discussed), "foot-in-mouth disease" is at least
usually disingenuous or ironic, perhaps like "kitten caboodle".  I've
never thought of "foot-and-mouth disease" as a particularly
transpondine usage.

Larry