New England-style eggcorn: winning/losing the "trifector"

[Laurence Horn]

"whr" on today's Boston Globe sports blog/suicide hotline refers to
last night as "Black Thursday" given the combination of the Boston
Bruins being eliminated from the hockey playoffs, the Boston Celtics
losing game 6 of their series, and the Boston Red Sox losing to the
Angels in California. He goes on to mention

"the trifector B's C's & Red Sox"

The standard term for parlaying wins on three bets (originally in
horse racing, but now generalized to other sports, used ironically
here for three losses) is of course a "trifecta".*   But if you're
from Boston, that will hypercorrect nicely to "trifector", which
gives you a plausible agentive/instrumental ending to boot.  Lots of
google hits for "trifector", although many of them seem to involve an
MP3 download site rather than a reanalysis of "trifecta" as here.

LH

*Often generalized freely to any perceived three-of-a-kind, as in
blogger Conservative Beach Girl's reference to "Obama, Pelosi, Reid:
The Socialist Trifecta".

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