"just one letter away"

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Sep 24, 2010, at 8:25 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>
> At 9/24/2010 07:42 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>> And, from the most recent encounters:
>>
>> http://bit.ly/cS9l7o
>>
>> I'll leave it a surprise.
>
> And nearby -- prostrate is just one letter away from prostate ... as
> I discovered one day acouple of times when I had intended to say the latter.

one letter away in writing, and one phoneme away in speech, and "prostrate" for "prostate" is common enough ion both cases to have made it onto Brians's errors list and to have been noted on the Eggcorn Forum a number of times.

but surely not an eggcorn. rather, an easy retrieval error (Fay/Cutler malapropism) to make inadvertently, as Joel Berson reports.  and also a word confusion that has probably been lexicalized for some speakers, in a classical malapropism.

"prostate" for "prostrate" would also be a fairly easy (inadvertent) typo to make -- of the omission subtype in "pubic" for "public" (and many others that could be cited, most of them not yielding an existing word, as in "quck" for "quick" and others that i myself am prone to make).

arnold

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