Possible partial eggcorn: portcullis >> fort colours

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jan 18, 2009, at 7:06 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

>
> I'd take the port > fort part of the current reanalysis to be a
> standard eggcornish folk etymology.  There are supposedly 1.8
> *million* g-hits for "fortcullis", although google does ask helpfully
> whether I mean "portcullis".

that's raw g-hits.  when i started searching through them, they got
reduced to 49!  and, as i reported earlier, none of those looked like
good candidates for an eggcorning.  (the huge initial number is
probably just the result of large numbers of references to the
Fortcullis anti-theft system.)

arnold

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