The Wide Blue Yonder

Spotted at a bus stop on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco:

 

The “worldwider” coinage is, as we say in my narrow world, the brandable element. It seems to me to be built not from “worldwide” but from “wider”: you wouldn’t say “We’re getting worldwide,” but you might say “We’re getting wider.”

Naturally, I couldn’t help remembering this exchange from “24 Minutes,” the 399th episode of The Simpsons:

Principal Skinner: Just how wide is the Web?

Lisa: World.

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The title of this post is meant to be a pun on “Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder,” the US Air Force Song (lyrics and music here). Nevertheless, when I searched for “wide blue yonder” I got more than 180,000 hits, including the title of a movie, the title of a novel, the title of an Oysterband album, and the name of a web-design company. In fact, it isn’t clear which is the eggcorn: “wide” or “wild.”

Comments

[mike]

Ooh, I like this one. Props to UAL.

(Of course, I'm an easy mark for the kinds of grammatical shenanigans that marketing folks think up.)

"wide blue yonder" -- sounds like you got yerself a genuine eggcorn there. Which then poses, as you show, the problem that if you use it in a manner intended to be clever, for all intensive purposes you risk looking like you're all, like, eggcorny. Dilemma.