Caught a nice eggcorn - at least I think it counts as one - on the UW L&S Honors Program description of a grant where a first- or second-year undergraduate gets to do a project with a professor over the summer:
The ultimate purpose of the apprenticeship is to allow talented students to learn what research is and how it is conducted within a discipline by participating in actual, cutting-edge research. You will not be a "gopher" in a professor's lab, but will have a significant opportunity to develop research skills and explore the research process while laying the groundwork for future junior and senior research projects.I like the way they put "gopher" in quotes. And you can see why someone would make the association - not only are the two words homonyms, but rodents are sometimes found in labs. Not usually in a linguist's lab, but they probably weren't thinking of us as the prototypical lab-having professor...
3 comments:
I would think that sounding like gopher is part of the coining of the word, and that it has existed as a variant spelling all along. If that's correct, then it's not an eggcorn, just a variant spelling.
Wiktionary thinks it's a variant spelling!
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gopher
The OED thinks the connection is actually part of the motivation behind the word: “Etymology: < vbl. phr. to go for, influenced by gopher n.1”
For me, 'gopher' will always designate first and foremost a hypertext protocol…
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