" Olive, the other reindeer"; was Re: "Trolling" for "Trawling": An Eggcorn?

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:38 PM -0400 8/2/07, Alice Faber wrote:
>Dennis Preston wrote:
>>Once years ago I stood in front of  a used car lot in Calgary
>>wondering why Otto's Auto's struck me as mildly funny; then I
>>realized that for almost ahl Canadians they are homophones. (And
>>nearly everybody west of the Mississippi, nearly everybody in New
>>England, and a passle of folk in a band through the middle of the US.)
>>
>>dInIs, who preserves such treasures of the tongue, by virtue of age and
>>region
>>
>
>I had a similar reaction when I first encountered the "Awesome Blossom"
>  fried onion appetizer at one of those interchangeable chain
>restaurants (Ruby Tuesday?).

No, I think it's Chili's.

I always figured these were intentional near-rhymes (do New
Englanders really rhyme "auto" and "Otto"?), but then again I could
never figure out why some guys thought I should be bothered by their
teases that hinged on rhyming "Larry" with "hairy" or "fairy".

As for Olive, she not only appears in an eponymous story and TV
special but she even has her own wiki-entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive,_the_Other_Reindeer.  Note the
reference to yet another Yule-tied [heh heh] mondegreen we haven't
covered here, Round John Virgin.  At least all these references are
making me feel a bit cooler on this sweltering night...

LH

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