to "lip-sync"

[Laurence Horn]

On Jan 23, 2013, at 2:07 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Charles C Doyle wrote:
>>
>> During a conversation with a colleague about recent Inauguration events, I realized,
>> with astonishment, that I had just uttered the preterit of "lip-sync" as "lip-sank" (or
>> should it be spelled "lip-sanc" or "lip-sanch"?).
>>
>> Google gives a few thousand hits for "lip-sanc," a lesser number for "lip-sank" and
>> "lip-sanch (with or without the hyphen, one word or two).
>
> We had some discussion in 2005 of the eggcorny forms "lip-sang"/"lip-sung":
>
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0502D&L=ADS-L&P=R3413&I=-3
>
> ...which Arnold incorporated into the ECDB entry for "lip-sing":
>
> http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/731/lip-sing/
>
> --bgz
>
That ECDB entry quotes me as saying "I’ve been using that one for years, at least since a 1994 "Words and Meaning" final exam, so it’s been around that long. I first came across it on a religious web site, of all places, in the gerundive form ("lip-singing")".  The same entry also contains the spotted-in-the-wild illustration “To the audiences dismay, almost the whole performance was lipsung” with a link (http://www.ottmall.com/mj_ht_arch/v11/mj_v11i72.html) to the mail.jewish group posting entitled "lipsinging" from February 1994.  This is in fact the very datum I'd come across in 1994, although I must have forgotten that it included not only the gerundive form (with no hyphen in the original text) but also that lovely preterit/past participle "lipsung" that Doug Wilson mentioned in our 2005 thread.

LH

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