Self-depreciation: eggcorn?

[Michael Quinion]

James Callan wrote:

> This phrase seems to be a common substitution for self-deprecation. It
> gets over 15,000 hits on Google, when you search for "self
> depreciation" -deprecation.

It goes back a long way - there's a (starred) example in the OED from
1827 and I've just turned up instances from Charles Dickens (1845)
and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1871) among a number of nineteenth-century
authors.

--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: <wordseditor at worldwidewords.org>
Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>