A sanitized eggcorn

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Thu Sep 3 04:22:43 UTC 2009


On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 11:46 PM, Alice Faber <faber at haskins.yale.edu> wrote:
>
> A twitter posting by Tyler Keppner, New York Times beat reporter
> covering the Yankees:
>
> "Girardi on Mo's groin: "We'll give it a few days off and try to nip it
> in the rear end." Yes, he said that."
>
> I'm seeing this as "nip it in the bud" being eggcornized as "nip it in
> the butt" and then sanitized to "nip it in the rear end".
> --

Yep. The first part of that process was an early entry in the ECDB:

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/135/butt/


--Ben Zimmer

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