“Making ends meet” i use to think it was, “Making ends meat” like all you can afford is the cut of bits off of undesirable meat. I never saw it written down before, and now I feel dumb.
I had only ever see trebuchet written, i had never heard it spoken. So young me thought it was pronounced tray-bucket. I was in my 40s before i finally heard someone discussing catapult vs trebuchet and realized it was french.
I was watching a video talking about how eggcorns are an unusual category of error because they require intelligence and creativity to make. The argument was that the process goes like this:
A new word or phrase is heard, but not understood. The brain makes sense of it using existing vocabulary that has sounds that are close enough. This is accompanied an explanation for why those specific words make sense in this new context.
For example: the original eggcorn was a mishearing of acorn. Egg because it’s roughly egg shaped, and corn is sometimes used to describe small objects similar to how grain can be.
All this to say, it’s maybe not something to feel dumb about. Your brain did something neat.
“Making ends meet” i use to think it was, “Making ends meat” like all you can afford is the cut of bits off of undesirable meat. I never saw it written down before, and now I feel dumb.
It actually refers to tying a napkin around your neck before eating. You had to “make the ends meet” before you could eat
hmm might want to update wikipedia with that because they say unknown etymology.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/make_ends_meet
I had only ever see trebuchet written, i had never heard it spoken. So young me thought it was pronounced tray-bucket. I was in my 40s before i finally heard someone discussing catapult vs trebuchet and realized it was french.
That’s a wonderful eggcorn.
I was watching a video talking about how eggcorns are an unusual category of error because they require intelligence and creativity to make. The argument was that the process goes like this:
A new word or phrase is heard, but not understood. The brain makes sense of it using existing vocabulary that has sounds that are close enough. This is accompanied an explanation for why those specific words make sense in this new context.
For example: the original eggcorn was a mishearing of acorn. Egg because it’s roughly egg shaped, and corn is sometimes used to describe small objects similar to how grain can be.
All this to say, it’s maybe not something to feel dumb about. Your brain did something neat.