I was watching the ABC World News Webcast on my Apple TV and David Muir keeps using the phrase “sea change”. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about, so I Googled “see change” and “seed change”. My “seed change” query turned up a blog that linked to an interesting article by famous sci-fi author Ray Bradbury complaining about how we have become frozen with our concrete freeways and have lost our imagination about exploring space. Finally, I discovered that “seed change” is an eggcorn for “sea change”, which is a cliché inspired by a passage from Shakespeare’s Tempest in which good-old Willy was simply describing what happens to someone when they’ve been in the water for a long time (as in dead, with coral growing on your bones, etc.). Please, people, can’t we think of more creative, original ways to express ourselves?
