Vegetable Melody

I am amazed at how many locals choose our vegetable melody. Is it because the broccoli is sometimes musical as it passes through our bodies? Or maybe when it mixes with Dite Coke, and surline cooked well with ketchup that it becomes a song.
The English language is an evasive beast. To every meaning, there is an inventory of words. This is probably ever more apparent to those who have learned this dialect as a second language. I am anal about pronunciation. Is it chi-pot-le or is it chi-pol-te. How many employees and managers here mispronounce the sauce on our menu?

I have an immediate, gag-like reflex to any blatant butchering of the language. But I try to offset this involuntary reaction with the realization that not everyone can see the “dead people” (i.e., comma splices, missing or misplaced apostrophes, phonetically spelled words, etc.) It seems like a new breed of literary butchering has surfaced. Known as eggcorns for the simple fact that a woman once mistakenly used the term in place of “acorns,” these words and phrases are the vernacular equivalent of the age-old song-lyric fumble (i.e., hearing Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” chorus as “hold me closer, Tony Danza”). But the interesting thing about these is that they are more than mere ignorant slights of the tongue. Eggcorns incorporate a seeming intuitive element; for instance, eggs are shaped like acorns, so the new name actually makes sense on a certain level.

Eggcorns are everywhere. This eggcorn database(http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/) has tracked more than 529 examples. You might have heard (and/or used) some of these:
Intensive purposes (intents and purposes)
Zero-sum gain (zero-sum game)
Pitcher (picture)
Buy one's time (bide one’s time)
Cadillac converter (catalytic converter)

I’d suggest we all try to steer clear of these, at least in our professional communications. You never know when you’ll come across someone who won’t take the error with a grain assault.