one such » once such

Classification: English – resyllabification

Spotted in the wild:

  • Web services is once such technology. (link)
  • Australian football is once such example. (link)
| Comments Off link | entered by Lee Rudolph, 2010/04/11 |

godsend » god’s end

Variant(s):  gods end, gods-end

Classification: English – resyllabification

Spotted in the wild:

  • See? This lady was a Gods-end to me. How could we possibly have so many interests in common? (Spring.net Geo conference, Feb. 22, 2000)
  • You know, in a way it’s a god’s end. That I lost my password. This made me to go on a little vacation. (The Iraq War Was Wrong blog, Apr. 16, 2005)
  • Aceh is a source of income, a place to loot. The tsunami is a gods end for them; the foreign aid is a new source of loot. (The News (Pakistan), June 7, 2005)
  • For my work, there’s a clear and obvious need to know if this machine is useful - and the try-60-days program is a gods-end. (The Daily Irrelevant blog comment, Mar. 26, 2006)
  • My one comes with built in Speed Camera alerts, so is a god’s end when your not in a familiar area, not that I speed! (Airliners.net forum, May 12, 2006)

Analyzed or reported by:

This is perhaps semantically justified by thinking of the thing/event bringing good fortune not as something sent from God, but as an “end” (result or outcome) of God.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2006/05/20 |

cell-phone » self-phone

Classification: English – resyllabification

Spotted in the wild:

  • You didn’t really understand my question as it was a short message from my self-phone where i can’t write with the full sentences. (Filmtracks.com comment, Mar. 14, 2002)
  • I got a call on my self-phone early this morning, waking me up. (Fiber Raven Soiree, Aug. 27, 2004)
  • Now, somebody is constantly calling on my self phone. (Right Ways, Mar. 12th, 2006)
  • He was chatting on his self phone (probably with a House colleauge or staffer) while impressively continuing to drive very carefully. (The Wind Beneath the Right Wing, Mar. 17, 2006)
  • If you have been arrested, find a moment when policemen don’t pay attention to you and hide your self-phone to boot or to sock, having turned off ringing tones beforehand. (gipfelsoli-l, May 14, 2006)

Analyzed or reported by:

Jeanette Winterson writes:

An Italian friend of mine, who learnt her English in America, calls her mobile her “self-phone”. Presumably she has heard it called a cell phone, but never seen the words written down — and it is a phone you use yourself . . .

An unsurprising reanalysis, since “cell-phone” and “self-phone” would both be pronounced as /sÉ›lfoÊŠn/ in rapid conversation.

| 3 comments | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2006/05/20 |

or other » or rather

Chiefly in:   something or rather

Classification: English – resyllabification

Spotted in the wild:

  • I mean the Labor Party opposed our tax plan didn’t they, they once did and now they’ve back flipped on their rollback or something or rather, I’m not quite sure. (Australian PM John Howard, interview transcript, Aug. 2, 2000)
  • Or, I could perhaps tell you what I know best, that is, something or rather about the importance of art in life no less than in Liberal Arts Education. (T. Kaori Kitao, Swarthmore commencement address, 2001)
  • So I have the P4 1.6, 512 megs of DDR, geforce 4600ti, and a nice soundblaster PCI something-or-rather. (PC Review forum, July 1, 2003)
  • But if you are having salary sacrifice for payment of your electricity bills or something or rather, I don’t think it pertains. (Australian Industrial Relations Commission transcript, Nov. 11, 2004)
  • It’s a wonderful morning Mr Walker and no doubt I will see you at the gates at Kirribilli House at some stage in the future on one of my early morning walks and you’ll be wanting my commentary about something or rather. (Australian PM John Howard, interview transcript, Apr. 30, 2005)

Analyzed or reported by:

This eggcorn appears relatively frequently in Australian sources. In the Australian vowel system, other begins with a near-open central unrounded vowel (represented as /ɐ/ or “turned-a” in IPA). This is not too distant from the first vowel in rather (/æ/, a near-open front unrounded vowel).

| 1 comment | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/09/05 |

boot(-)strap » boots-trap

Classification: English – resyllabification

Spotted in the wild:

  • Germans have the strength and the will to pull themselves out of a crisis by their own boots-traps, if only they believe themselves capable of doing so. (Address by German President Roman Herzog, Apr. 26, 1997)
  • The information for notification group defines the set of objects to generate SNMPv2-Trap-PDU’s. The well-known traps group defines the set of well-known boots-traps. (Raj Jain, "Network Monitoring Fundamentals and Standards", Aug. 14, 1997)
  • One would run into a trapped, self-referential problem if the “test” result were scrutinized in the same way as normally done with an external measurement equipment where a prediction value is acquired to estimate the validity of the result. No wonder that algorithms of the iterated Bayesean type are called “boots-trapping methods” and associated with hermeneutics. (Hans H. Diebner, "Dasein's Edge on its Description", Nov. 21, 2004)
  • Quantified gene expression levels were subjected to several supervised and unsupervised bio-informatics analyses and boots-trapping procedures to determine differences or degree of similarity between matching pairs of one patient. (San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium Abstracts, Dec. 8, 2004)
  • After boots-trapping the start-up of the JXTA platform, for which there are two options, the GUI application will want to instantiate one instance of the net.jxta.instantp2p.PeerGroupManager class. (JXTA Demonstration GUI)

Some examples make an explicit link to “traps” or “trapping.” Appears to be a common reinterpretation among German writers using technical English.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/08/11 |