Eggcorns: brown flakes

There was a nice eggcorn on the BBC TV show Young, Dumb and Living off Mum on Sunday night.

One of the remaining contestants, Dina, was surprised to learn that bran flakes are indeed called bran flakes and not 'brown flakes' as she had always thought.

It's an easy mistake to make, seeing as bran flakes are, well, brown...


Dina from Young, Dumb and Living off Mum - photo courtesy of the BBCDina: Young, Dumb and Living off brown flakes

3 comments:

Laura Payne said...

I never did like bran flakes and I think it is because they are brown.
Oops, I meant to say - I never did like brown flakes and I think it is because they are bran.

-- said...

I've been called up for using two eggcorns at work this summer.

First I put 'flare for' instead of 'flair for' in a headline, which I personally think is totally acceptable (so does The Times: http://tr.im/wVYI).

More recently I wrote 'throughfare' instead of 'thoroughfare', which I admit was little less excusable.

Stephen Samuel said...

For a while, when I was young, I misunderstood some of the words to 'winter wonderland', I mistook "We'll pretend that he is Parson Brown" as "We'll pretend that he is chocolate brown."

This continued until one day when I stopped to think about how to make a chocolate brown snowman. The next time I heard the song, I listened very carefully.