Eggcorn: groan pull

[Mark Peters]

I noticed a groin/groan confusion in a student paper, and it looks like others have made the same mistake:

  Yea, there prics, and they will pay for it some how, maybe the dillweed will pull his groan or hamstring when he squats.
  http://forum.bodybuilding.com/archive/index.php/t-101154.html

  Mruczkowski said some NFL officials told him the reason why he dropped down was because of a groan pull that he suffered a week prior to the Combine in February.
  http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050425/SPORTS09/504250413

  Unfortunately, I just found out I have a pulled groan muscle (not from P90, either a fall or moving a box with my leg) and she said I can not exercise for 2 weeks!
  http://www.beachbody.com/forums/T2492925834.jsp

  I'm not going to sit here and brag about the fights i have been in, because the only one I was actually in was a Bench Brawl in Bantam A, and I had a pulled groan and I was limping out on the ice to try to pull players apart, no fighting for me.
  http://www.ecmtb.com/forum/showthread.php?p=350431

  Besides having things pinch one's gonads isn't exactly a plesant feeling either, nor would getting kicked in the groan.
  http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=321156

  One day at school, I was playing dodge ball in gym and I got hit in the groan by a hard kicked ball.
  http://www.timbooktu.com/lawrence/pigblank.htm

Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Charles Doyle
Subject: Eggcorn
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My local newspaper this morning prints a letter-to-the-editor decrying the voters' recent approval of a school tax increase. We citizens will now be "throwing yet more money into the stinkhole called 'education'" (_Athens Banner-Herald_, 24 Nov. 2006, A10).

I don't believe it's an intentional pun; the letter-writer seems quite witless.

Google gives 19,800 hits for "stinkhole" and 18,000 for "stink hole" or "stink-hole." Unlike the letter-writer's, however, most of those instances don't appear to be confusions with "sinkhole" but rather references to a very dirty or messy room or (more literally?) an anus.

--Charlie

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