Possible eggcorn hits close to home

Seen in a comment from a social networking site:

"Your alive ? I thought this was a line through a wishyboard...."

I wouldn't have understood what this meant without the context. But it's pretty clear that "wishyboard" is being used here instead of 'ouija board'. So we have the alteration/substitution necessary for an eggcorn. Do we have a reasonable semantic reanalysis?

It's a tough one. Is it likely that "wishy" refers to the divining, eking, asking, and pleading that might accompany a ouija board session? Is there wishing involved in the typical seance? Wishing upon a pentagram?

And beyond the possibility of a reanalysis here, this is nonce term with extra weight on the "once". I couldn't find any relevant hits in a quick search on Google™. This might be a true one-off. But there's just something about it…

It is the cost. It is the cost.

It's unfortunate that some women are given the brunt of the blame for the failings of a man. Desdemona certainly was not the cause. Lady MacBeth might have been. So what about Jessica Simpson? Her on screen appearances during the Dallas/Philadelphia game have elicited a lot of vitriol. Some people are arguing that Tony Romo was distracted and that's why he played so badly.

I love Bettyboo's comment on this OMG!/Yahoo! piece: "From the start I knew that Jessica (the air head) was going to cause the Cowboys the game."

That looks like an eggcorn in there. To cause the game is an obvious mishearing of to cost the game. Is there a reasonable semantic reanalysis? Well first let's see if there's enough of this going on. First I'm going to go with 'caused us the game' in my initial search.

[...sound of tapping on computer keyboard...]

Wow. Yeah it's out there. A Google™ search for "Caused us the game" brings up 6720 hits. And the first five are all what I was hoping to find.

"Any fool can see that is what caused us the game" source

"h3po4 did an really nice \kill on map16, almost caused us the game" source

"Ultimately, this is what caused us the game." source

"but we were unable to capitalize on their mistakes and it caused us the game." source

"'It was not the untimely timeout that caused us the game ' explained Cuban" source

Bettyboo uses a form that makes it look like she has heard 'cost the game' and interpreted it as 'caused the game' so she changes the verb according to a standard grammar when she chooses the phrase "going to cause" instead of 'caused the game' in her comment.

This morphology is out there too. A search for "cause them the game" gets 12,300 hits. How many of them relevant? Enough.

"which will cause them the game in the end." source

"one little mistake done by a teammate can cause them the game" source

"He threw two late interceptions which cause them the game." source
(this one doesn't follow the standard rules of verb tense. It could be an 'eary' spelling. You know--one of those errors that makes me type throw when I meant to type throat just because they sound so similar.)

"This decision may cause them the game which is unfortunate" source

One result looks like a gapped construction.
"however lack of focus could cause them the game and loose ground to Inter Milan." source

The coordination with that second phrase that doesn't have a subject makes me think the writer might have intended to say 'could cause them to lose the game and lose ground to Inter Milan.' In that case it would have nothing to do with the cost→caused eggcorn.

But it could still be a relevant example if the writer meant to produce something like 'lack of focus could cause them the game and to lose ground' -- which would be sweet. Zeugma and an eggcorn relying on each other.

That might be too much to ask.

[Update:
The cost→caused construction has been mentioned and discussed already on The Eggcorn Database. I didn't mention it here but one the EcDb forum I noted that one necessary condition of an eggcorn (the semantic reanalysis) was unclear to me. What exactly would 'caused the game' mean? The last example above looks like a possible effect of a blend and that might be just what's going on in these examples. But it's not a clear failure. If a clear meaning and semantic motivation can be found for 'caused the X' this would work as an eggcorn.]

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Oftly ambiguous

I just came across the phrase "which is going to be oftly hard" during my daily perusal of the worldwide net. It's going to be hard often? I thought. Then I caught the eggcorn possibility. I searched for "oftly" before various adjectives and adverbs. Here are some of the phrases I found:

• It was oftly late, and he was tired. here


• it's oftly dark and dreary right now. here


• dane cook is oftly funny also. here


• you're going to feel oftly dumb when you lose out here


• Who knows if Eli Manning will ever be as good Peyton, its oftly early to tell, here


• You were oftly quick on that one Corry. here


• I was only curious because that Navigation button looks oftly difficult to use. here


• They're easy to make, healthy, and you'd have to try oftly hard to screw it up. here

I provide fuller snippets of this use because oftly meaning often or frequently could be used in pretty much the same phrasal environment. Longer bits of text give us clues that help distinguish between the two uses. Consider the possibility of an eggcorn or not in the following pairs of sentences:

1. His shirts are oftly wrinkled


2. That shirt is oftly wrinkled


3. His shirts are oftly hideous


4. That shirt is oftly hideous

Sentences 1 and 2 can be referring to how often the wrinkles occur. It's easy for a shirt to be sometimes wrinkled sometimes not. Of course both sentences could also be using oftly for awfully. These are ambiguous.

Both 3 and 4 could refer to how often the shirts are hideous. But 4 looks less likely. The implication of sentence 3 would be that he often wears hideous shirts--not that the appearance of each individual shirt often 'becomes' hideous. Sentence 4 focuses on a single shirt and is less likely to mean 'often'. Would the shirt change prints? There is still ambiguity but there's a more likely meaning of 4.

Fortunately I found sentences like "you'd have to try oftly hard to screw it up" because often wouldn't likely occur between "try" and "hard". Modifying "try" it's more likely to follow the phrase ('try hard oftly') or perhaps precede it ('oftly try hard')--unless the intention was to use "hard" to modify how you "try oftly"--[[try oftly] hard]. Not a likely reading considering how common the phrase "try awfully hard" is.

The necessary reanalysis of meaning (to make it an eggcorn) looks reasonable. This isn't likely a mere misspelling of a misheard word--especially since the new spelling is a less common word (270,000 hits for oftly vs 6,650,000 for awfully).

The voiceless alveolar [t] might be excrescent between the voiceless [f] and the alveolar [l]. Then again who knows if it's pronounced by those who write it? There's plenty of historical evidence for [t]→Ø/[f]__: soften often not that a similar rule/process is necessarily applied or at work here but the result of the Early Modern English trend provides the precedents for a possible analogy.

But it's still tricky trying to trace a clear path from oftly=often to oftly=very. There's a shared sense of escalation between the two words. And consider that from really to rather to terribly to quite and of course to awfully we see terms of intensification coming in from all directions.
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