First I read this a "Gaugin's secret HAIR" and was even more confused!

But what I really came here to post was about how fanfiction has made me realize how weirdly many people hear/spell what I would consider common phrases. I mean, I thought the words of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Dah included "Happy as a Rafter in the marketplace...", but still it just makes me giggle a bit:

for example, I just read

I have the near uncontrollable urge to yell `good riddins' as Amy leaves the debate, but somehow I hold my tongue.

Oh, oh. Can we play the "most annoying mis-heard phrases" game?

The people who say "Doggie Dog World"? Make me want to do minor acts of violence.

It's particularly fun when you run across a long passage full of multi-syllable words to indicate the speaker is a genius, and the author doesn't know how to spell really ordinary ones like "are" or "you're."

Yeah Shakespeare, you've convinced me that Daniel Jackson is a "genus" without compare.

The one I despise is "for all intensive purposes."

Good one, tep!

How about with "baited breath"?

It seems a fic should be written that validly has both baited breaths and intensive purposes.

I saw a rec the other day that used the phrase "a mute point".

I know a couple of linguists who call these mis-heard and mis-derived phrases "eggcorns," after an example of someone coming up with an elaborate explanation for why the things that fall off oak trees are like eggs that wear hats. (We call them acorns.)

I think you get 1 eggcorn point if you reproduce a mis-heard phrase without thinking it through, but 5 points if you think through a completely legitimate (or anyway, reasonable) derivation history for your mis-hearing.

And, a lot of these dealies end up as general parlance. Do you know anybody who says the "spit and image" of someone? No -- we all say "spitting image", which was an eggcorn invented probably 100 years ago.

I think you have to have a very good sense of humor to be a linguist.

I think you have to have a very good sense of humor to be a linguist.

It's self-selecting. If you have a sense of humor, you become a linguist. If not, you write cranky letters to the editor about these kids today and how they don't teach proper English in the schools anymore.

Gaugin? Er, painter Gaugin? How does he get to have secret heirs?

The usual way, I suspect: random, accidental insemination at a fertility clinic in Tupelo of a beautiful young ingenue who bears an infant son and then dies tragically in a golf cart incident, leaving behind a fortune and a beautiful-yet-emotionally-damaged Postimpressionist little boy.

Or Gaugin met Michael's great, great, great gran in his travels, tumbled her, painted her a picture, and left before she found out she was knocked up, so g-g-g gran shrugged, got hitched and had the kid, and a lifetime in Spike years later, wossname unearthed said painting from the attic and nearly pissed himself at Antiques Roadshow when it was verified as an authentic.

It loses something when you leave out the golf carts and the mystery of how Gaugin's frozen spoodge got to Tupelo.