mind » mine

Chiefly in:   open-mined , go through one's mine

Classification: English – questionable – final d/t-deletion

Spotted in the wild:

  • CWM (Christian Witch Ministry) is Spiritualy open mined to all things. (link)
  • William Hodge, a former UW-Oshkosh anthropology professor, says there are natural explanations for most phenomena, but he remains open-mined. (link)
  • It is hereby declared that the Carleton University Debating Society exists to the following ends: * To foster clearheaded and open-mined discussion among the individuals, communities, and organizations of Carleton University on issues relating to Carleton University, the City of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and the World; (link)
  • The city becomes an multicultural city and is the most open-mined city in Australia as the city welcomes different races, cultures, classes, and sexualities from many parts of the world, it is most agreed that it is one of the most livable city in the world. (link)
  • I would offer advice but truth be known, fishing interests me just slightly less than football. But something else runs through my mine now. I am fascinated by their own sense of cohesiveness, achieved just moments before the actual departure and long before the weekend itself begins. (link)

I originally thought this was just a typo often committed by writers of personal ads and followers of alternative spiritual paths, but it’s use is apparently a lot more widespread than that - I found it on government sites, debate clubs, travel guides, etc. There is an actual mining term “open mine” which gives the mis-uses a plausible origin, but while “open mine” is not rare, the phrase “open mined” does not appear to be a common form of the phrase in the context of mining.

[update] Thanks for feedback from David Romano, who discovered several hundred occurrences of the phrases “running through my mine”, “going through my mine” and “on my mined”. He confirmed that a large number of these are “mind” related. A large % of these usages are either in transcriptions of song lyrics or in the context of urban slang so the spelling could be intentional. Perhaps we can attribute the origins of this back to Mark Twain, who in his short story “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” (1892) has one of his characters say “dey’s somefin on my mine”.

[added by Arnold Zwicky, 22 July 2007] Frank McQuarry writes with an occurrence of “of like mine”: Where else will you see this picture? This was done on July 14th and today being the 22nd and I have yet to have seen this image any place else. Of course I will pass it on but to whom . . . To folks of like mine. So here we are again preaching to the choir. (link)

| link | entered by vinylrake, 2005/02/25 |

Commentaries

  1. 1

    Commentary by chris waigl , 2005/02/26 at 1:16 am

    Oh, I think they are saying what they think they are saying. They are just not (sufficiently) aware that the standard expression deals with minds and not with mines.

  2. 2

    Commentary by David Romano , 2005/02/28 at 6:55 am

    After looking at a definition of “abby” on urbandictionary.com, I noticed someone wrote “running through my mine all day”. I did a google search of “running|runnin’ through|thru my mine” and came up with 89 hits. Then I added going|goin’, and got a count of 142. I then looked up “on my mine” and got a count of 616. I looked at the first 6 pages of the results, and about half referred to the context of “having something on my mind”. I this is related to the eggcorn of mined/mind, showing that “mine” is being used in other phrases as well. Should this eggcorn be expanded to mind >> mine?

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