Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Usage update: I thought as much

As I was pondering the usage rant a few posts back it suddenly occurred to me that 'step foot' for 'set foot' was almost certainly an example of the phenomenon recently christened the eggcorn.

If you follow that link and read up on the eggcorn, and then follow the link under the heading 'Examples' to the Eggcorn Database, you will find 'step foot' listed there. Not to mention a whole lot of other excellent stuff including 'hone in on' for 'home in on', which is one of the most common eggcorns about.

5 comments:

Ampersand Duck said...

One of my personal favorites is 'this thing is snowboarding out of control', something my ex-boss used to say.

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Heh! Vivid mental picture.

Zoe said...

And I just saw one at Mel's facebook thread looking for Melbourne shibboleths - "can I handball that to you?" instead of "hand over".

Or is that some other kind of thing?

Anonymous said...

I'm so glad you mentioned 'watching on'. When the ABC started using it my faith in my own grasp of proper usage began to falter (or is that halter?) even while my blood pressure rose.
And although it is something else entirely (typo, freudian slip, or both) I recently had a student writing about rouge bushrangers, so watch out for them while you're dodging ampersand duck's snowboarding out of control boss...
tyaakian
oh, and whoever that was, casting a rogue, or indeed rouge, vote in the US is about as easy as getting a green card. or getting out of guantanamo bay. or closing guantanamo bay.

Barry Leiba said...

I used to know someone who insisted that "Little pictures have big ears," was the correct version of the adage.