swivel room

[Victor Steinbok]

Overheard on  Fox News (don't ask!--the Sean Hannity show):

"There is no swivel room to accommodate the water."

The comment was from a comedian commenting on the irrigation pumps
supposedly being shut off because of inflexible environmental rules.
There is one hit for "no swivel space" in a patent for a swivel joint,
but plenty more for "swivel space", which actually makes sense. "No
swivel room" gets no hits, "Swivel room" gets 252 raw ghits, most
irrelevant (17 out of the first twenty have commas between the words,
two more--parentheses). But even when it makes sense (when discussing
clearance for a swivel bar stool) it's not close to the odd metaphorical
meaning here.

By comparison, "no wiggle room" gets 3 million raw ghits and "wiggle
room" another 500K. _Eggcorn_? Or just a one-off oddity? Before you
answer, consider that there are a dozen hits for "no riggle room".

    VS-)

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