Eggcorn: Conjugate for Congregate

[Joel S. Berson]

At 5/29/2009 11:06 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 8:35 PM, Doug Harris <cats22 at stny.rr.com> wrote:
> >
> > Just found this in a note on a Facebook page (of an arms-length relative
> > of whom I'd never heard until two days ago):
> >
> > "Some kid has stopped in the middle of the hallway with a group
> of his friends. They've conjugated in the middle of the hallway,
> sucking up valuable space so they can do something stupid like
> compare shoe sizes."
>
>I didn't think they allowed that in school, let alone in the hallway!
>
>3 a: fusion of usually similar gametes with ultimate union of their
>nuclei and sexual reproduction that occurs in most fungi and in some
>algae (as green algae) b: temporary cytoplasmic union with exchange of
>nuclear material that is the usual sexual process in ciliated
>protozoans c: the one-way transfer of DNA between bacteria in cellular
>contact
>(Merriam-Webster, "conjugation")

Must be a Latin school.

Joel

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