Language Log

From A.G.:

I think I may have found a new eggcorn this weekend. I forget how I came across it but apparently there are a lot of people on the Internet who are writing "sure and hell" instead of "sure as hell" (which is what I believe the saying to be).

Have you encountered this before? It could perhaps be an autocorrect issue so it would be nice to see this in a spoken corpus. I checked the buckeye but didn't find any instances of it.

There certainly are plenty of examples of "sure and hell" as a substitute for "sure as hell", including some in books where autocorrect seems less likely than in short web-forum comments that might have been entered on a smartphone.

Similarly, there are some examples of "plain and day". Like A.G., I'm not sure whether these are typos, autocorrections gone wrong, or wrongly lexicalized idioms, though I suspect that some of them do represent what the writers think is correct rather than what some helpful program does. Commenters may be able to provide relevant arguments or even evidence.

Looking into the background of the idea that modifiers are immoral, I read Richard Lanham's Style: An Anti-Textbook (available as an ebook from amazon and google), and found this description of writing instruction:

What we have now is a tedious, repetitive, unoriginal body of dogma—clarity, sincerity, plainness, duty—tarted up every week in a new, disposable paperback dress. The dogma of clarity, as we shall see, is based on a false theory of knowledge; its scorn of ornament, on a misleading taxonomy of style; the frequent exhortations to sincerity, on a naïve theory of the self; and the unctuous moralizing, on a Boy Scout didacticism.

From "Zits" for August 30, 2013 — the episode just before the one featured in "Earworms and white bears":

Zits for 8/31/2013: