I can see how some language changes come about. For example ‘croissant’ is the French for ‘crescent’, but in English it only has the sense of a crescent-shaped pastry. I have now started to hear people asking for a ‘chocolate croissant’ meaning a ‘pain au chocolat’, which is rectangular. In English, ‘croissant’ therefore appears to be in the process of calving from its mother iceberg of ‘crescent.

‘Brand new’ was originally ‘bran new’, and ‘rule the roost’ was originally ‘rule the roast’. No doubt people originally rued the incorrect usages that are now accepted.

There is probably a well-worn path of (a) correct usage (b) some variant creeps in and annoys people (c) it sticks and is used more widely (d) descriptive rather than prescriptive dictionaries (which should they be?) start referring to it (e) the variant becomes correct.

I’ve never heard anyone refer to a firework as a squib these days, which (Mark) is not the same as saying there aren’t any fireworks any more.

Most of the results for “high gudgeon” are either explicit puns about fish or references to gudgeon pins. The number of genuine mistakes is vanishingly small.

Perhaps it would be a good idea for you to run all your examples through Google again using quotation marks, and filter out the false positives.

Yes, you are absolutely right about the quotaion marks, Mark.

But this is just one case out of hundreds. Here’s one I came across recently: try Googling “high gudgeon” versus “high dudgeon”.

J – and no, most people don’t know what a squib is. You are in a fortunate minority.

I worked for OUP from 1981 until 1994; One of the first titles I was involved with was the “Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English”, which I thought was brilliant. English like what I spoke, with examples. Where else would you find the phrase “Don’t take your car to that garage, they made a balls-up of mine”? I was immediately smitten with words and explanations. Idioms such as this and Quotations go arm-in-arm, so to speak.

Thanks for your response. I’m afraid I can only replicate anything like your results by searching *without* using quotation marks to search for the phrase. Of course, one would expect many pages about squid to include the word ‘damp’ somewhere or other. But since the point is to check the use of the *phrase*, you need to include the quotation marks. In case I’m not being entirely clear, what you need to type into Google is not:

damp squid

but instead:

“damp squid”

Try that, and see what results you get.

Well I did my search from the UK, but it was on the whole web. Problem is, Google figures change all the time. But I’ve just checked, and squiD 1,160,000 is while squiB is 124,000.

If I restrict my search to the UK, the respective figures are 55,300 and 42,900. I believe lots of people really don’t know what a squib is – I first read it as a child in Oscar Wilde’s “Remarkable Rocket” from his Fairy Tales, but hardly recall coming across it again outside the idiom. Certainly in Scotland most people know what a squib is, and perhaps that’s true of parts of the US as well.