seat » seed

Chiefly in:   deep-seeded

Classification: English – /t/-flapping

Spotted in the wild:

  • Still, eight years ago, Darryl Reginelli saw, as others would later on, an opportunity in New Orleans’ lack of a deep-seeded pizza tradition. (Times-Picayune, January 28, 2005)
  • Iesa Galloway, Houston Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said the questionnaire was “rooted in deep-seeded ignorance of the religion of Islam and the Muslim people.” (Fox News, January 19, 2005)
  • “The brain is the seed of emotions, personality, vocations and creativity. Brain disorders not only produce physical disability but also hinder human potential. Our goal is to restore the brain to its maximum potential at as early an age as possible,” says Dr. Wiebe, Kinsmen Chair in Pediatric Neurosciences. (Dr. Samuel Wiebe to help children with injury and illness of the brain, U Calgary, January 13, 2005)
  • Epicuren Medicated Acne Cleanser, A medicated anti-bacterial deep pore cleansing gel that is non-irritating to the skin. This product is designed to sterilize the skin’s surface, lift and remove residue and loose dry skin. (Rosanna’s Salon & Day Spa)

Analyzed or reported by:

In the Language Log post cited above, Mark Liberman writes:

>For most Americans, “deep-seeded” is pronounced exactly the same way as “deep-seated”, due to (what linguists call) flapping and voicing of /t/ in words like seated, as in many other contexts (e.g. in fatter and rabbiting and at all, but not in attack). And in terms of the current ordinary-language meaning of the words involved, “deep-seeded ignorance” makes sense, while “deep-seated ignorance” doesn’t. Ignorance can be planted deep and thus have deep metaphorical roots, but deep-seated ignorance would have to be ignorance cut with a lot of room in the crotch, or maybe ignorance sitting in a badly-designed armchair.

We might add that for most speakers, the verb _seed_ will be common in the sense relating to sports competitions, leading to _top-seeded_. AHD4 defines this sense as follows:

>7\. Sports a. To arrange (the drawing for positions in a tournament) so that the more skilled contestants meet in the later rounds. b. To rank (a contestant) in this way.

| link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/01/31 |

Commentaries

  1. 1

    Commentary by Lee Rudolph , 2005/10/07 at 12:16 am

    I have just noted today a slightly different (barely attested) family of examples of “seat >> seed”:
    “seed of one’s pants” for “seat of one’s pants”.

    broodingpersian.blogspot…. :
    “my grip on the seed of her pants behind her knees”

    www.jwfan.net/index.php?n… :
    “hes going by the seed of his pants”

    alpha.musicforamerica.org… :
    “At best, they had poor intelligence and were flying by the seed of their pants.”

    (note that Google has no occurences of “seeds of their pants”; for “seats of their pants” vs. “seat of their pants”, Google reports 500-odd vs. 47,000, so perhaps one shouldn’t expect to see any “seeds of their pants” even if it exists, but presumably the phonetics are against it, too)

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