eggcorn

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 3/8/06, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> At 6:25 PM -0800 3/8/06, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> >Okay. How about this one, from the "Selling It" page of _Consumer Reports_:
> >
> >"'04 Chevy Impala, one owner, 30k mi, ... emasculate $11,900"
> >
> >There's something like that in religion, too !   The Emasculate....
> >
> >   No, I won't say it.
>
> but it does explain a lot...
>
> (and indeed there are 137 raw google hits for "Emasculate
> Conception", surprisingly none of them offering it as a name for a
> 70's-era rock band.)

I'd guess that a lot of the non-punny examples are actually
spellchecker artifacts. If "immaculate" is misspelled as "emmaculate"
or "emaculate", then MS Word suggests "emasculate". (Cf. "acquainted"
misspelled as "aquainted" and getting changed to "aquatinted".)


--Ben Zimmer

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