"the brunt of so many jokes"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Feb 22, 2007, at 6:57 AM, i wrote:

> ... as jerry cohen just suggested, possibly a syntactic blend of
> "be the
> butt of" and "bear the brunt of", facilitated by the phonological
> similarity of "butt" and "brunt".

to clarify: what i'm suggesting is that this use of "brunt"
*originated* in some sort of error -- a blend or an eggcorn (though
i'm unclear as to why "butt" would be reshaped as "brunt") -- but
clearly it's now just a widespread variant.  i'd expect that almost
everyone who uses "brunt" this way would see no problem with it if
questioned about it (as John Baker has now reported of himself); for
them, it's not an inadvertent error.

arnold

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