Thou shalt not eggcorn?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 3/13/06, Mark Peters <markpeters33 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> A few weeks ago, a friend was stuck riding with a slightly loony cabbie. Along
> with some other disturbing behavior, he started grilling her about religion, and
> at some point he came up with this beauty:
>
>   "Do you know all the Ten Amendments?"
>
>   Pretty wild, huh? This guy's giving quizzes and he doesn't even know what
> they're called.
>
>   Anyway, I would love to find this in print too, but all my searches all lead me
> toward discussion of real amendments. Has anyone heard this before?

Richard Lederer had it in one of his laundry lists of student
bloopers, included in _Fractured English_:

http://www.verbivore.com/arcblpr.htm
"Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the Ten Amendments."

Lederer never cites any sources for his purported malapropisms, so I
tend to think of them all as apocryphal. Nice to see one actually
spotted in the wild.


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org