[Ads-l] equine eggcorn

[Laurence Horn]

> On Feb 25, 2021, at 12:56 PM, Mark Mandel <markamandel at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> Thanks, Laurence. In one of the early posts to this thread, perhaps the
> initial one, I was unable to decipher the mention of "wh" vs. "h" (as I
> believe it was phrased) till I eventually got to the explicit expansion of
> the expressions.
> 
> MAM

The conversation between the two coffee-shop workers in the CBC skit was deliberately cryptic, the point (or a point) being that one of the women was extremely naive and the other was familiar with, but extremely uncomfortable with, the expression ("whore’s bath”) involved, whence the indirection.  And in response to Chris Waigl’s point, neither the characters nor writers of the show nor I were endorsing the underlying misogyny.   

LH
> 
> 
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 11:32 AM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> 
>>> On Feb 25, 2021, at 11:22 AM, James Landau <
>> 00000c13e57d49b8-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Somewhat off topic for "horse bath":  a stockbroker told me that a
>> narrow difference between bid and ask prices is a "wife's spread" but a
>> wide difference is a "whore's spread”
>> 
>> Or, more delicately if more obscurely, the difference between wife’s bread
>> and horse bread.
>> 
>> LH
>> 
> 
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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