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intolerant » and tolerant

Chiefly in:   lactose and tolerant , lack toast and tolerant

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Oh. i love Cold Stone Creamery! Sad thing is I can’t really have much of the ice cream there anymore since I am lactose and tolerant. (CMC Central forum, Aug 19, 2005)
  • Milk and string cheese, that’s all im going to eat from now on. Till I get lack toast and tolerant. (Dream Views forum, Aug 13, 2005)
  • ya thats disgusting man i cant believe you your lack toast and tolerant thats an early sign of homosexuality which im notsok with. (Teen Sexuality forum, Sep. 11, 2003)
  • I am trying several different medicines to try to control that and they think that I might be lactose and tolerant, after 13 years of worshiping milk. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Michael Quinion (for the double eggcorn "lack toast and tolerant") (World Wide Words newsletter, August 20, 2005, citing Michael McKernan)

As far as I have been able to determine, and tolerant instead of intolerant only occurs in cases where the writer is aiming for lactose intolerant (in whichever spelling).

Strangely, even for the second most common medical term of the form “X intolerant”, gluten intolerant, the substitution doesn’t happen. An extrapolation of search engine hit counts for lactose intolerant, lactose and tolerant and gluten intolerant led me to expect about a dozen occurrences of gluten and tolerant. Considering that in tolerant changes the meaning of intolerant to its opposite, I wonder if the reshaping becomes more likely with increasing obscurity of the modifying noun, and if some writers believe that lactose is an adjective, maybe related to comatose.

For further discussion of on the double eggcorn lack toast and tolerant see the entry lactose » lack toast.

[An email discussion with Arnold Zwicky helped clear up this reshaping.]

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/09/15 |

flush » flesh

Chiefly in:   flesh against

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • The fiberglass fish he paints must be hollowed out and mounted flesh against the wall, he said. (Waterfront News, Aug. 2002)
  • One participant thought I should indent the text, so that the text is not flesh against the Web page border. (San Diego Beaches, SDSU, Aug. 12, 2004)
  • This version of Cerebro is, similar to the movie version, a big round room. The only difference is that it is more of a half-circle, with a computer console almost flesh against the wall opposite the door. (Genetic Anomaly forum, Feb. 28, 2005)

Analyzed or reported by:

See also flesh » flush.

| comment | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/09/15 |

sensor » censor

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • The Mercenaries have motion censor goggles. The motion censor goggles will obviously detect motion. (Talk XBOX, game review)
  • And my car, at the shop for a regular checkup.. they replaced some sort of dual oxygen censor.. and now it appears one of the new censors was bad. (napsterization.org, blog entry, September 12, 2005)
  • Morino Tamagotch, Tamagotchi Garden or whatever you wish to call it, while it does have a motion and sound censor, it does not talk anymore then a Tamagotchi Angel does. (link)
  • Question: Umino Tamagotch/OceanGotchi/Tamagotchi Ocean has a water censor and I have to put it in water for a certain amount of hours per day? Answer: No. Wouldn’t we all love that though? This rumor has been proven false by the owners of Umino Tamagotch. While it does have a sound/motion censor like Angelgotch, it doesn’t have a water censor. If you put it in water, it will break. (link)
  • I think that it is due to the new generation lens specifically designed for the new 8MP digital censor. (Tom's Hardware, camera review, May 21, 2004)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Kevin Marks (on IRC, September 13, 2005)
| 2 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/09/13 |

airwaves » airways

Classification: English – questionable

Spotted in the wild:

  • LaVallee has found a real need to teach supermarket strategies, particularly with high profit items such as sugar coated cereals promoted continuously over the airways and single serving microwavables stocked high on the grocers, shelves. (Univ. of Rhode Island news release, Apr. 1, 1999)
  • It took Slobodan Milosevic four years of hate propaganda and lies, pumped daily over the airways from Belgrade, before he got one Serb to cross the border into Bosnia and begin the murderous rampages that triggered the war. (Univ. of Pennsylvania, Arts & Sciences newsletter, Fall 2000)
  • As Election Day looms just days away, Al Gore and George W. Bush are making their final pushes over the airways. (Swarthmore Daily Gazette, Nov. 1, 2000)
  • Media Bill opens the airways to worldwide ownership. (The Scotsman, May 9, 2002)
  • This expensive improvement in technology will ensure that beloved shows stay on the air in remote parts of the state, where full-powered religious stations have been granted licenses by the SCC that bump low-powered public translators off the airways. (Utah State Magazine, Summer 2003)
  • Back on the Airways for the First Time in 43 Years. (Johns Hopkins University news release, Oct. 16, 2003)
  • A white New Yorker who bought black station WOKS in Columbus, Ga., was able to use the airways to get civil rights protesters off the street in exchange for brokering a deal with the mayor to integrate city facilities, Ward said. (Univ. of Florida news release, July 14, 2004)
  • Yet that thought no doubt terrifies not just Fox, but every one of the (handful of) networks that now control our airways — which is why Fox’s first response to the Greenwald film was to warn other networks not to take it seriously, or risk “opening (themselves) to having (their) copyrighted material taken out of context for partisan reasons.” (Lawrence Lessig, published in Variety, July 14, 2004)
  • And I, myself, thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people, probably over the airways, say, the bullet has been dodged. (Pres. George W. Bush, press briefing, Sep. 12, 2005)

Analyzed or reported by:

Marked questionable, since airways may be an accepted variant of airwaves, arising out of usage in radio broadcasting. The Oxford English Dictionary lists this sense in the entry for airway:

3. A radio channel (cf. AIR n.1 1c). U.S.
1934 in M. WESEEN Dict. Amer. Slang xii. 165. 1946 Baltimore Sun 10 Oct. 18/8 By that time a radio broadcaster had appeared with a portable microphone but Ted had nothing for the airways, even after most of the other players had taken their turns at the ‘mike’.

From Merriam-Webster Collegiate:

4 : a channel of a designated radio frequency for broadcasting or other radio communication

And from Random House Unabridged:

5. airways,
a. the band of frequencies, taken collectively, used by radio broadcasting stations: The news was sent out over the airways immediately.
b. airwaves.

It’s possible, of course, that the ‘radio frequency’ sense of airway(s) started off as an eggcorn which then gained acceptance in some quarters. But it’s notable that many news outlets such as the New York Times chose to “correct” Pres. Bush’s Sep. 12, 2005 usage of airways (as it appears even in the official White House transcript), replacing it with airwaves.

[Edit, CW, 2005/10/14: see also parting of the waves.]

| comment | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/09/13 |

averse » adverse

Chiefly in:   adverse to

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • They said they were not adverse to giving local people first chance. (Lederer & Dowis, Sleeping Dogs Don't Lay, p. 63)
  • We are not adverse to adding additional accounts as we come across them simply because out of each account a little more is learned. It should also be noted that Clan Chief’s themselves were not adverse to “improving” on their own official histories to make themselves look a little more important or to minimise a particularly sorry part in their clan history. (link)
  • 3) If ResearchBuzz has covered your resource before, please let us know why we should cover it again. We’re not adverse to covering resources more than once, but you need to make a compelling argument as to why it should be done. (link)
  • We’re not adverse to meeting with you and your daughters and sons if that makes sense, though our experience suggests that the prospect of a meeting will appeal more to you than to them. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Adam Linville (link)

I heard an NPR reporter say that someone was “adverse to handouts”, and found, amid many legal usages of “adverse to”, some more that replace “averse to.”

[AMZ, 15/16 September 2005: The advice manuals mostly treat “adverse”/”averse” as a simple word confusion, like “flaunt”/”flout” or “militate”/”mitigate”; see, for example, Hatcher & Goddard, The Dirty Dozen: Words Even Smart People Misuse, p. 24. The American Heritage Book of English Usage has an entry that seems to suggest that the substitution can go in either direction. Brians has it; he notes that “averse” is a much rarer word than “adverse”, which would suggest “averse” >> “adverse” as the more likely substitution. Lederer & Dowis speak of “confusion”, but give only the example above, from a Concord (NH) Monitor story quoting a local businesswoman. Finally, Fiske’s Dictionary of Disagreeable English has an entry for incorrect “averse” (i.e. “adverse” >> “averse”), but Fiske notes that “adverse” is sometimes used for “averse”, with a citation of “risk adverse market participants”.

“Averse” is not only (probably) rarer (in text frequency) than “adverse”, but it is also (certainly) more restricted in its collocates, being pretty much limited to “averse to s.t.” and “risk-averse”, while “adverse” can modify a variety of nouns. The raw Google web hits favor “averse” >> “adverse”, with “adverse to” getting something like 1,700,000 hits (many of them, as Burlingham noted, in legal usages like “adverse to their interests”, but there are still a huge number of mistaken occurrences of “adverse to”) and “risk-adverse” getting ca. 127,000, while expressions like “averse reaction”, “averse reactions”, “averse effect”, “averse effects”, “averse weather”, and “averse circumstances” get hits only in the hundreds.

But is either of these substitutions an eggcorn? You can make a case for “averse” >> “adverse”, given the relationship of “adverse” to “adversary” and “adversity”, with a semantic component of opposition that is also present in “averse to”. The case for “adverse” >> “averse” is much weaker.]

| comment | link | entered by Ann Burlingham, 2005/09/13 |
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