Broiling Over

By Anne Curzan. If you reinterpret “in fetal position” as “in feeble position” or use “hunger pains” rather than “hunger pangs,” you’ve got yourself an eggcorn. The word eggcorn itself is an eggcorn (a reshaping of a word—in this case, acorn—based on a new and plausible understanding of its parts and/or meaning). Geoff Pullum picked up on Mark Liberman’s Language Log post on eggcorns to coin the term as a way to refer to this phenomenon; and it has found its way into several dictionaries with this meaning. More...