CAPTCHA a Gimpier Clive

So I was registering with the Eggcorn Forum so I could tell everyone there about Dina's brown flakes when I was given this great CAPTCHA:



Just who is the mysterious 'gimpier Clive' (or rather, 'gimpier CLIVE'), and who is he gimpier than?

According to Wikipedia, one of Yahoo's early CAPTCHA programs was called EZ-Gimpy. I'd really like to know the connection between gimpiness and CAPTCHA...

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: Young, Dumb and Living off brown flakes

Eggcorns: power phrasing

In recent copy, one of our reporters wrote:

While I have power phrased Mr Wood somewhat, the system's benefits have already been seen

Even without the full context, it should be pretty obvious that 'power phrased' is an eggcorn for 'paraphrased'.

It was almost a shame to change it...

Eggcorn: shoring up problems for the future

I came across this in raw copy recently. I'm not sure whether it's a typo or an eggcorn (and I still hate that term), but it made me laugh:

this strategy is shoring up problems for the future

It should, obviously, be 'storing' rather than 'shoring'. I quite like it this way though.

I think you've got the wrong word...

Here are some sentences taken from copy submitted to the subs' desk over the past few months. The theme is 'wrong words', whether they are malapropisms or simply the result of poor typing.

“The form details who collect it, where it was collected and who pre-treated it,” Allen bemuses.

Episodes of curtain slashing are ripe in the motorway service area.

Rampley inserts that the problem is occurring all over the UK.

The vehicle specifications have the ruining costs worked out.