“Somehow, over the last thirty or forty years, teams have come to “clinch” the pennant.”

–That’s because “clinch” means “to make final” or “settle.”

Perhaps, but I was the copyeditor at McCall’s only a few years after computers and spell-checkers became common in the industry yet still before very many non-tech, non-business people had them in their homes. And I got a letter from a reader scolding me for using the wrong term; everyone knows, she wrote, that it is “chaise lounge.”

I think she had been mis-reading it; most folks weren’t spell-checking things much at that time.

My favorite was the Charlie Brown cartoon where he is playing tag and cries out “Alley alley oxen free-o!” and, I believe, Lucy corrects him, “That is supposed to be ‘Alley, alley, all out are in free’” Charlie Brown was quite embarrassed, but there was no way I was going to get rid of my oxen free-o.

Somehow, over the last thirty or forty years, teams have come to “clinch” the pennant.

E W Gilman

One quibble though. Surely an analogous but distinct orthographic process is responsible for “chaise lounge”? This one must be based on a mis-reading (or a mistaken assumption of error) because “longue” and “lounge” don’t sound much alike. A true eggcorn for “chaise longue” would be something like “chairs long”.

Perhaps we can think of a term for such adaptations that’s as catchy as “eggcorn”.

Andrew.

Note that “phased by” is not really an eggcorn, because there is no reanalysis involved. “Phase” is simply a variant spelling of “faze,” accepted by some but not most dictionaries, that long predates science fictional phasers.