[Ads-l] "running the gambit" in the wild

[Ben Zimmer]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 11:21 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
> Yes, _run the gambit_ is already in the eggcorn database at
> http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/174/gambit/.  But none of the cites
> Chris assembles there are for edited (one hopes) prose in an actual
> book.  There's one such in Harlan Coben's _Play Dead_ (2010), Penguin
> Books:
>
> "But this was merely her mother's latest in a long series of Thursday
> night attempts at female bonding, running the gambit from bridge games
> to sexual-awareness encounter groups."

'Twas I, not Chris, who put together that particular ECDB entry. As
with many other entries I assembled in the early days of the database,
I focused on college publications for citations (easily found by
Googling on the .edu domain), since the prose in such sources tends to
be *somewhat* edited and thus more interesting for eggcorn-hunting
(from my perspective) than random blogs and forums. Even better when
eggcorns appear in carefully edited printed sources, as with Larry's
example.

--Ben

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