"Knell in the coffin"
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From Will Lockett, "We Are Watching The Death of Tesla", Medium 10/18/2024:
This is why the fact that Musk didn’t detail any safety data at ‘We, Robot’ was a knell in the coffin.
Google's AI Overview explains, ignoring the difference in spelling:
The standard metaphorical phrase is "nail in the coffin", of course.
And knell is an easy substitution for nail because it's similar in sound, and has the adjacent meaning of a bell rung slowly to signal a death.
But "knell in the coffin" is far from a typical eggcorn — a funeral bell wouldn't fit in a coffin, so the substitution is not really plausible; and coffin nails remain a familiar reference, even if modern coffin lids are often fastened shut in other ways.
Still, "knell in the coffin" is Out There, if rarely — for example, from the transcript of a Congressional budget committee hearing on 9/25/2019, where Bill Johnson is represented as saying:
You know, I believe any discussion on infrastructure, we talk about the Highway
Trust Fund, but one of the other really critical, important, rural infrastructure issues is broadband and building out broadband.
I know that is not funded out of the Highway Trust Fund, but in rural areas like Eastern and Southeastern Ohio, where most of my district, six and a half hours long, from an hour outside of Cleveland to an hour outside of Cincinnati; most of
my district has inadequate broadband service.
In a digital economy, that is a death knell in the coffin of rural communities.
The obligatory (Lockett) screen shot:
J Knight said,
October 20, 2024 @ 8:22 am
To add, in the part of the country I live in (Appalachia) knell and nail are pronounced the same, not just similarly.
[(myl) Good point. And Bill Johnson was born in Roseboro NC, which is not Appalachia, but probably shares the same monophthongization. On the other hand, he cited a "death knell in the coffin" (or at least he was transcribed that way), so there's metaphorical mixture beyond mis-spelling "nail". And Will Lockett is British, though I don't know from which dialectal region.]
Rodger C said,
October 20, 2024 @ 9:54 am
And then there's the Appalachian folktale, "Nell in the Coffin." (Not really.)
David L said,
October 20, 2024 @ 11:04 am
A death knell in the coffin seems pointless. The people outside won't hear it, and to the person inside it's adding insult to injury.
Jonathan Smith said,
October 20, 2024 @ 12:18 pm
@David L OTOH this might preclude that annoying asking of for whom the bell t̵o̵l̵l̵s̵ knells