Do you enjoy eggcorns?

And where did "berk" come from? Cockney rhyming slang. It's short for "Berkshire hunt" which rhymes with a vulgar word for a lady part. Now you know.

 

And apparently that word isn't nearly as insulting in Britain as it is in America, where it will get you slapped at the very least.

 

"Berkeley hunt" rather than Berkshire hunt - but curiously, "Berkeley" is pronounced "Bark-lee", while "berk" rhymes with "work".

 

Well, it's still pretty offensive here.

 

Huh. I had a couple of Brits on another message board tell me it's not very bad, about like calling somebody a dork. Maybe they were pranking me?

 

It's more offensive than dork, but it very much depends on context. When I worked in London, that word was bandied around the office regularly. Whereas if you walked up to someone in the street and called them that, you're likely to get punched in the mouth. Call a policeman a dork, and he's probably going to be mildly amused. Call him that word, and it won't go well.

 

"You're banging at the wrong tree."

Don't ask... it just made sense to me at the time... okay?

 

They are good for humorous purposes. For instance, I sometimes say "There's something rotten in Detroit" because it's a quote by Maxwell Smart. And in the video game "Blue Estate", there's a bungling character who keeps saying things like "Let sleeping dogs be bygones" and "It's not rocket surgery". However, if someone seriously writes "public hair" because he doesn't know it's really "pubic hair", then he just makes himself look like a complete moron.

 

It occurs to me - are eggcorns not malaprops? Or is there a difference?

 

"It's not rocket surgery" is a classic mixed metaphor. I use it often -- not in writing, but in everyday speech. Obviously, it's a combination of "It's not rocket science" and "It's not brain surgery."

 

I guess this could be an eggcorn. The second sentence in the introduction to a certain First Lady's PhD dissertation reads:

The needs of the student population are often undeserved, resulting in a student drop-out rate of almost one third. Pretty sure she meant 'underserved'. It isn't often a one-letter misspelling changes the meaning of a sentence completely.

 

And that's the sort of typo that eludes Spell-Check. I wouldn't call it an eggcorn, though. If it were, a whole legion of typos... "pubic" for "public," for example ... would enter that category.