Eggcorns? We don't need no stinkin' eggcorns

[Chris F Waigl]

Laurence Horn wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Eggcorns? We don't need no stinkin' eggcorns
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Michael Quinion in his current World Wide Words (#552, 15 Sep.)
> reproduces this gem, courtesy of his correspondent Rick Larson:
>
> In an article by Jennifer Ferguson about beers in the 6 September
> issue of Buzz Weekly, the student newspaper of the University of
> Illinois, appears this: "The ol' factory system has a lot to do
> with taste." ...
>
> Googling the full form, ["old factory system" + smell], I found these
> related instances of this redolent eggcorn:
>
> ================
> This is garbage, smell this! An ambrosial delight for the old factory system.
> ================
> [Comment on young woman wearing T-shirt with "HIPPIES SMELL" legend]
> Either that or hippies smell stuff. Unlike her. She's probably coked
> out her entire old factory system and would probably not smell the
> house burning down,...
> ================
> My old factory system is so strong that I can smell my own boogers!
> ================
>
> and this one, my favorite, from a transcript of the discussion at a
> Stanford colloquium:
>
> =================
> http://www.bootstrap.org/colloquium/session_08/session_08.html
> I was fascinated by something I read in a science magazine a while
> ago, the old factory system is something that is used to make our
> neurons grow the right place when we are forming. It smells its ways
> to your fingertips. How do we put our factory nodes into this so that
> the neurons will smell their way to the right place?
> ==================
>
> (I like the way it's reduced to "our factory system" on the second
> mention, since after all there's no *new* factory system to contrast
> with it.)
>
>
>

It must be harvest time.

And there I was thinking that this bizarre reshaping could never be a
real eggcorn, but you present cites from people who are making actual
sense of this.

Chris Waigl

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