In case anyone else is confused by the short list that's just the way they use their main page. If you want a quick read list there is the browse page instead https://eggcorns.lascribe.net/browse-eggcorns/
There is another species of malaprop, one that has no name as far as I know, that I was made aware of by someone who was writing a character for a game who would use them copiously.
They are the intersection of an idiom or colloquialism and a mixed metaphor. Examples include “I'm running a little behind the eight ball” or “really went the extra mile in his shoes.”
Here's the relevant part:
"sometimes people also like to play with mixed metaphors. It can be a fun way to turn a cliché on its head. For example, I’ve seen people mix the metaphors “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” meaning let’s put off the decision, and “Don’t burn your bridges” meaning don’t destroy a something you’ll need later. They get “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” which combines the meaning of the two metaphors into something like “We’re ready to fight when the right time comes,” and still maintains imagery that makes sense."
"We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it" seems to be considered a mixed metaphor, rather than anything more exotic.
I have not heard that before. My somewhat litteral spectrum disorder brain implies the bridge is burnt before it is crossed.
Common ones I hear are "I'll cross that bridge when I come to it" - to delay an action or decision and "Don't burn (all) your bridges..." - leave a path open for a reversal.
That’s the usual interpretation I’ve seen, yes. It’s a mix between the other two metaphors you mention, with the humorous implication that the speaker is going to delay taking an action until dealing with it will cause further problems.
Example sentence: “My manager doesn’t know I can’t work on Wednesday, but he hasn’t posted the schedule for the week yet so I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.”
Not exactly "eggcorns", but as a father of a 3 year old, I'm constantly getting a kick out of the incorrect but plausible words she uses. E.g. "bump beds" for "bunk beds", "de-odor-mint" for "deodorant", "screamer" for "speaker".
Love those great examples! But I wonder why you say Not exactly "eggcorns", as "incorrect but plausible" is pretty much the definition: https://eggcorns.lascribe.net/about/ (I guess maybe because they're not exact homophones?)
It has manner/manor, but it's missing my favourite one: "to the manor born". There was an English TV series named that (as a pun), and probably a majority of people here don't realise that the original phrase is "to the manner born", from Shakespeare. Arguably it's not even an eggcorn but a phrase in its own right now, so maybe that's why it's not listed.
The idea of the eggcorn database is that these are descriptivist linguists - they believe language already existed anyway and they're just explaining an observable phenomenon, not somehow dictating what is or is not English. Some of these changes just remain forever considered mistakes. If you woke up a hundred years from now the chance everybody calls the little things which fall from oak trees "eggcorns" is negligible, they're acorns, you've misheard.
But on the other hand it's possible that in 2124 everybody considers "bi-election" normal as duh, there was an extra election, that's two, so bi-election, losing the analysis which got us the current word "by-election".
There are eggcorns related to the manor/ manner distinction, in particular "bedside manor" seems like a pretty obvious misanalysis. But you're correct that both "to the manner born" and "to the manor born" are considered reasonable idiomatic English.
"content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8" but I'm seeing a lot of sequences such as "U+00E2 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX, U+20AC EURO SIGN, U+2122 TRADE MARK SIGN" where there's clearly supposed to be an apostrphe.
I think in recent years a major source of these are OCR errors in scanning text. Occasionally while reading texts from Gutenberg project, one finds mysterious strange words which aren't found in any dictionary.
