An assortment of short notes that have come my way recently, on errors, back-formations, penguins, gender roles, and more.
Archive for the ‘Eggcorns’ Category
Odds and ends 8/14/13
August 14, 2013Briefly noted: mind-bottling
May 18, 2013Just went past me on KFJC (Foothill College in Los Altos Hills CA), in an aural montage, this exchange from the 2007 movie Blades of Glory:
Chazz: Mind-bottling, isn’t it?
Jimmy: Did you just say mind-bottling?
Chazz: Yeah, mind-bottling. You know, when things are so crazy it gets your thoughts all trapped, like in a bottle? (link)
A lovely eggcorn for mind-boggling (noted on the Eggcorn Forum, but not yet in the database), complete with the mark of a great eggcorn find, the speaker’s rationalization for the form they use.
An unfortunate mishearing
April 9, 2013
One Big Happy roundup
March 17, 2013perils of wisdom
March 13, 2013Reported this morning by Mike Jankulak from a mailing list he’s subscribed to:
Also Ryan, I had sent you a question on the other group in hope you might have some perils of wisdom to share there.
(Perils of wisdom for pearls of wisdom.) In context, this doesn’t seem intentional, but the question is what sort of unintentional error it represents: an eggcorn, a mishearing, a simple misspelling, or what? These things are often hard to decide, and the perpetrators might or might not be able to shed light on things. And of course the source of one occurrence might be different from the sources of others.
Eggcorns on the net
February 21, 2013Today’s “A.Word.A.Day” posting from Anu Garg is about the word eggcorn.
concordance ‘example, occurrence’
January 30, 2013Back on December 5, Lynne Murphy reported in Facebook about an essay-marking game — drinking a shot of liquor or eating something whenever a particular expression occurred in a student essay:
‘concordance’ to mean ‘example found in a corpus’, as in ‘COCA has three concordances of this collocation’.
… I’ve read this so many times, that I actually looked it up to see if this terminology was polysemous in ways I had not yet appreciated.
(No evidence for it I could find in dictionaries.)
So an error, but what kind? Mishearing (of occurrences)? Classical malapropism (perhaps as a result of learning the technical term concordance)? Eggcorn? Examples like this can be remarkably hard to classify.
Putting the man in manicure
January 13, 2013Today’s Zits reanalyzes the word manicure:
Girls get their nails done at a salon, guys bite theirs.
Two cartoons
January 10, 2013Two language-related cartoons came by on Facebook a little while ago. One I think I understand pretty clearly — it involves a demi-eggcorn — but the other baffles me, not because of what it says (involving the glottal stop), but because I don’t understand why the character who speaks is saying it.