I edit a lot, like a lot a lot, and I’ve come across some funny typos over the last fifteen years. Some of my favorites are “the whole gambit” instead of “the whole gamut” (a gambit is a chess move) and using “escape goat” when it should be “scapegoat,” which is someone or something that takes the blame for others and has nothing to do with farm animals going awol. Ah, the English language…

These confused sayings have a name: eggcorns.

The Eggcorn

Are you familiar with the term eggcorn? It was one of the 1700 words Merriam-Webster added to its dictionary back in 2015, defined as “a word or phrase that sounds like and is mistakenly used in a seemingly logical or plausible way for another word or phrase.”

Btw, the term eggcorn is itself an eggcorn; it is how many people pronounce the word acorn.

Muster?

When I was editing a document and came across “pass mustard” instead of the correct phrase “pass muster,” I decided to do some digging to find out the origin of this particular phrase. Muster isn’t a very commonly used word today. In fact, I usually only hear it used in the idiomatic phrase “to pass muster.”

In the fifteenth century, the term muster referred to the act of calling together soldiers, sailors, or prisoners for inspection, exercises, or counting. “To pass muster” simply meant to meet the standards of the inspection. Today, the expression is used figuratively to mean “meet the required standard,” and the circumstance doesn’t have to involve soldiers, and it certainly has nothing to do with mustard—not the condiment, not the color, not the colonel in the game of Clue.

My Favorite Eggcorns

Some of my favorite eggcorns are listed below alongside their corrected versions:

• biting my time: biding my time
• doggy dog world: dog-eat-dog world
• expresso: espresso
• duck tape: duct tape
• pre-Madonna: prima donna
• take it for granite: take it for granted
• wheelbarrel: wheelbarrow (side note and confession: I find wheelbarrow a difficult word to pronounce; I tend to want to say the eggcorn version)
• wonderlust: wanderlust
• nip it in the butt: nip it in the bud
• cinch the deal: clinch the deal
• pass mustard: pass muster
• escape goat: scapegoat
• the whole gambit: the whole gamut